


Kairos Amid the Ruins

by Lomonaaeren



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Breaking the Universe, Drama, Harry Potter is Not the Boy-Who-Lived, M/M, Mentor Harry Potter, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2020-11-23 04:35:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 24
Words: 75,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20886212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: Harry’s attempt to time travel and fix the past went badly awry. Time shattered, and the various pieces of the universe clung to each other as best they could. Harry finds himself in 1961, with Albus Dumbledore the Minister for Magic, Gellert Grindelwald his loving husband, Voldemort newly defeated…and Severus Snape being proclaimed the Boy-Who-Lived.





	1. Fix What You Broke

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to be a long story, focusing on Harry mentoring Severus as the Boy-Who-Lived, with flashbacks to an alternate World War II. The Harry-Severus mentorship will remain gen. However, the romantic pairings are a prominent part of the story. The word “Kairos” comes from the Greek, meaning a lucky moment, or the right moment, to act.

****Harry tumbled through the mirrors.

That was what they looked like, broken mirrors flashing past on either side of him. He saw the faces of his parents, and Severus Snape, and Gellert Grindelwald, and Garrick Ollivander, and fellow Aurors, and Voldemort, and thousands upon thousands of people he didn’t know, staring at him with open mouths, wide eyes, or shouting voices, or focused on someone else entirely.

The mirrors broke and broke and broke again, a rain of glass and sand joining Harry’s fall through the non-time.

Sand. Sand, glass, hourglass. Harry remembered, for a hazy second, the sand of a Time-Turner pouring from one bulb to another. Like Hermione’s in third year. Like the one he’d held, briefly, before a crazing crack had torn across the air right in front of him.

He’d been in the Department of Mysteries, in the Chamber of Time, and all he had been trying to do was travel back in time to keep Voldemort from killing his parents.

Voices passed him through the non-air, meaningless words. Harry fell and fell and fell. He became aware he wasn’t breathing, tried to suck in a lungful of air, and felt the burn and the burn and the cough.

He still didn’t breathe, as he tumbled through a sky the color of rain towards a destination he didn’t understand.

Cracks ripped apart the greyness. He saw—not blackness through them, but a kind of dull non-existence. Nothingness. Cracks all around him, the sound of shattering glass of what sounded like an aeon of mirrors, and the nothingness increased.

_Congratulations, Mr. Potter, you broke the universe, _said a voice that sounded like Snape’s, but could have been his. Snape was dead.

Except, was he? In this universe that was tearing itself apart around Harry, maybe all the people who had ever been dead were alive. And all the people who had been alive were dead.

He had doomed his friends, in a rash effort to save his parents.

The guilt burned in a way that the non-air hadn’t. Harry struggled furiously to get his feet underneath him and lunge in a particular direction. The mad thought danced in his head that he ought to be able to fix what he broke if he just found all the sand and glass particles that had made up the Time-Turner. He might have forever to search, if time was no longer passing, right?

But he couldn’t stop falling, or even stop turning head-over-heels. He thought he would vomit, but a marble whirlwind clamped his chest and a rain of sand or fine, fine glass tore into his eyes.

Harry shrieked. There was no sound. There hadn’t been a sound, he abruptly realized, since he had heard Snape or not-Snape’s voice talking about breaking the universe. All around him was nothingness, and when Harry stretched out trembling hands, he felt nothing.

He recalled a scrap of text in a book he’d read about Muggle sensory-deprivation tanks, and how people could go mad floating in them, suspended, unable to see or smell or touch or hear—

Or maybe he was already mad. Maybe he was already dead. Tumbling endlessly through non-dark while the universe apparently broke apart around him could qualify.

Harry looked around, and then gasped as a spark of light appeared in front of him. He reached out to it, since he still appeared to have a body, honestly not caring at the moment what it was. A way to the King’s Cross afterlife where he had spoken with Albus Dumbledore once before? A reflection from a mirror? He wanted to touch it.

Warmth suddenly sprang into being around him, and Harry sobbed his gratitude to a god who might not exist to hear it. He shivered as the warmth abruptly changed to cold, but then one of the cracks began to knit together, slowly, looking as if a surgeon were working on the biggest wound in history.

Mirrors abruptly ignited all the way around the space he had been falling through, revealing it as circular. Or maybe dome-shaped, or a sphere. Harry didn’t care about that, either. What he cared about was that the universe appeared to be healing itself.

_Do you think you are that lucky, Mr. Potter?_

Harry ignored the voice this time. He didn’t even have evidence that it was more than the product of his own mad delusion. He stared upwards as faces appeared in the mirrors and light filtered back in and voices spoke, and sobbed.

_Do you deserve to return to the world you came from?_

Harry didn’t know if he did, or even if it was possible, but he was going to try. He found himself reaching up and out, towards a mirror with Ron and Hermione smiling at each other, standing with arms entwined and waving to him with their free hands. It looked identical to a photograph he had had on his mantel for years.

His hands closed around it—

And then tore away.

Harry went spiraling down towards other mirrors, and what looked like a knitted skein of light, with a cry of loss. Hermione and Ron receded faster and faster, still waving, still smiling at him as though everything was fine. Harry tried to swim up through the air, or the waves, towards them. Nothing happened. The force continued to suck him in faster and faster.

Then Harry collided with the light, and felt pain for the first time since he’d tried to breathe the non-air. He thought his head struck something, and his eyes certainly slammed shut.

The last thing he heard was the cool, judgmental voice that reminded him of Snape’s.

_You go where you are needed._

*

Harry opened his eyes to rain.

That wasn’t so unusual for England, and it actually made him sit up and look around in hope. He was under a thick, old tree with drooping leaves, one he didn’t recognize right away. Well, he wasn’t Neville to be a genius in Herbology. Far more important was the slope of mud right in front of him and the torrential river that flowed at the bottom of it.

Harry stood up, slowly, wavering back and forth, and got a better glimpse of the river as he finished brushing mud off his robes. He stared.

There was something _wrong _with it.

The water flashed and twisted with sparks of yellow and blue, as though it had drowned a neon sign when it began to rise. The sparks leaped up and brushed against each other like entwined, dancing dolphins. And the hum of magic that Harry hadn’t been able to feel from under the tree was obvious once he stood on the bank—or what was left of it.

Harry remembered, vaguely, reading that running water was one of the hardest things to work lasting enchantments on. Who had done this? Was he outside some wizarding estate that used magical water to guard its borders? Perhaps this was a place near Malfoy Manor he’d never seen before?

Shaking his head, Harry drew his wand and cast an Impervious Charm, and then concentrated. Transfiguration that lasted a long time had never been his strong suit, but all he needed to do was create a bridge from rock and wood that would get him over the actual water.

Carefully, he formed the bridge, the floating pieces of rock snapping into wooden planks and the splinters of bark into handrails. The bridge grounded itself at his feet, and Harry ran across it, light-floated, his wand still drawn. If the river really was an enchanted defense, then it might fade away when he got above the middle, and he wanted to be ready to perform a quick Levitation Charm.

But the bridge held, and Harry set foot safely on the other side of the river. He shook his head as he glanced back at the rush of heavy, sullen water. The magic in the water didn’t feel as strong from over here. Odd. Perhaps it was meant simply to deter people who would have tried to cross it on foot.

Harry Vanished the bridge and set out to find exactly where he was.

*

Harry leaned on the dirty wall behind him and closed his eyes. His stomach hurt from the sharp clenching in it, but he couldn’t do much about it. Nor could he do anything about the soundless breaths pouring from his mouth, or about the tears making their way down his cheeks.

He had noticed something was wrong almost as soon as he began to walk down the streets of London, which had proven to be just beyond the enchanted river. For one thing, the cars and buses going past him looked different. Older. And streets wound in places that he knew they shouldn’t wind, and there were more cobblestones he remembered, and there were—

There didn’t seem to be things like Muggle mobile phones that he’d got used to over the last decade, either.

Harry opened his eyes and stared in silence at the _Daily Prophet _clutched in his hand. It felt like it had taken him forever to find. Then again, Diagon Alley hadn’t been where he’d expected it to be, either. The Leaky Cauldron was gone.

And Diagon Alley had been...far more than an alley.

There was a pop in the distance like a champagne cork, and a glittering display of fireworks rose overhead. Harry stared blindly upwards, flinching as one of the rockets flared green like the Killing Curse. But there wouldn’t be that much association with it here.

Because, as the front page of the _Prophet_, dated April 2nd, 1961, proclaimed, Voldemort was dead. They had printed his full name and everything.

And there was a photograph of the boy who had defeated him, black-eyed and scowling even at the age of fifteen months, the lightning bolt scar standing out hideously on his head. Harry closed his eyes.

The boy’s name was Severus Snape. Already he was being called the Boy-Who-Lived, and the paper reported breathlessly that his Prince grandparents, who had disowned his mother Eileen when she married a Muggle, had agreed to adopt their “precious grandson.”

Harry understood more now than he had an hour before. The universe had knitted itself together any way it could. It was a theory that he had heard Hermione discuss once before, during an idle hour when he and Ron were joking around and she was reading, as usual. If something _did _happen where a wizard managed to meddle with time enough to break it, most wizards thought time would mend the break.

But it would probably do so by grabbing great events and stitching them together in a new order. Hermione had even had a theory of times during wizarding history when that might have happened, but Harry was half-pissed and trying to beat Ron at Exploding Snap when every loss meant he had to drink a third of a mug of Firewhisky. He hadn’t listened.

He would have given anything, at the moment, to hear her voice again.

In all probability, his world no longer existed. In all probability, Ron and Hermione might not be born now. Their parents might have other children, or perhaps they had lived and died in some other time. There was no way to tell. They existed only in his memory now.

Neville was gone, too. Ginny. The rest of the Weasleys. Hannah Abbott, who had become a close friend after the war as she dated Neville. Luna and her fascination with weird magical creatures. Minerva—

“What you doin’, mister? You can’t cry here.”

Harry looked up, and something about his face made the young man in front of him step away very fast. The man swallowed nervously. He wore sleek robes of a style that Harry hadn’t seen before, made of blue and silver cloth and wound tightly to his body. He pointed a willow wand at the ground with a hand that shook.

“I’m moving on,” Harry snarled, and sounded savage even to himself. No wonder the man sort of cowered and watched him cautiously. He stuffed the paper into his robe pocket and turned away.

“I mean—sorry, did someone die?”

“Something like that.” Harry kept walking, not looking at the man next to him. He had to make the best of things, he told himself in a numb echo of his voice inside his head. If he gave in and mourned the way he wanted, he’d never recover. And none of his friends or family would want that.

“You a stranger here?”

“What gave it away?” Harry asked dryly. His robes looked nothing like those of anyone else on the street, but so far that hadn’t caused many people to look at him. They were far too occupied with the fireworks and the other parts of the celebration of Voldemort’s overthrow.

“Well—it’s just, I took a NEWT in Divination, see?” The man waited for Harry to grunt. “And my old professor, he told me summat once...”

The young wizard trailed off. Harry sighed. “Yes?”

“He told me that I’d meet a man crying against a wall with a piece of paper in his hand, and that man was the one who could help me make my business a success.” The young wizard abruptly darted around in front of Harry and aimed his wand at him. Harry just stared at him incredulously.

“And he’d do that because you took him prisoner?”

“Just don’t want to chance you getting away, see.” The young man studied him from under floppy blond hair. “What’s your name?”

“Harry Evanson,” Harry said quietly. It was true as far as it went, and he had no desire to claim the names Evans or Potter, not when he had no idea what the status of their families was in this world. Maybe they were dead, or famous criminals. Maybe they were alive and snooty blood purists. He had no idea.

His mum might not end up being Muggleborn even if she _was_ born. That was beyond weird to think about.

The man nodded briskly. “Laocoon Palmer.” He paused, as if he thought Harry would react to the name somehow, but Harry only blinked at him. Palmer grunted. “I make my business selling defensive objects.”

Harry reflected bitterly for a moment that he could have used a mirror that was enchanted to yell at him about playing with Time-Turners. “You mean dragonhide gloves and that sort of thing?”

Palmer drew himself up with offended pride. He didn’t go very far. “Hardly such trinkets! No, I make my business with ward-imbued stones, amulets that cast the Shield Charm for you, boots that snap at people who try to steal them—”

“All right,” Harry interrupted. He’d never heard of or seen a shop in Diagon Alley that sold that kind of thing, but he would simply have to get used to this world being different. “And how do you think I can help?”

“My Divination professor said so!”

“Look, for all you know I could be a Dark wizard.” It looked like the naïveté and stubbornness of the wizarding world had stayed the same, anyway, Harry thought. Maybe it was one of the foundational building blocks of any universe.

“How many Dark wizards would be leaning against a wall in the alley and crying?”

Harry sighed. He had to admit there probably weren’t many. “Fine, but I don’t have NEWS in Defense or anything.” He actually did, but he doubted any such records had made the transition with him.

“That’s fine! You have some practical experience, right?”

Harry stared at him, and Palmer pointed smugly to some of the scuffs on his boots and the slashes in his cloak. “I recognize the spells that made those. I know that you can probably duel. Well, come and apply that experience to my shop! Cast the curses for me so I know how to create objects that defend against them.”

“You can’t cast them yourself?”

Palmer adopted an innocent expression that didn’t conceal the way his cheeks flushed. “Don’t want to get in trouble with the Aurors, do I? Minister Dumbledore has _serious _opinions about curses like that.”

Harry felt as if someone had punched him in the solar plexus, but he forced himself to put his astonishment aside and move on. “And the real reason? If it was the one you just said, you wouldn’t want me to cast them and bring the Aurors down on your shop, either.”

Palmer’s blush deepened before he sighed. “I have such a strong affinity for defensive magic that it’s hard for me to cast offensive spells. I can do all the countercurses you want, but I need to see the curses at close range when I’m not trying to bloody _survive _so I can know how to put different defenses on the objects.”

Harry nodded slowly. He doubted he would get a better offer, and he was here with no money or friends or shelters to his name. “All right.”

They started down the street again, Palmer chattering brightly away about how glad he was that he’d found Harry, that his Divination Professor had been right, and that Harry’s hair could use a wash. Harry found himself wondering distantly what kind of detritus would get into your hair from a fall between universes.

“Where did you come from, anyway?”

Harry started and looked up. Palmer had apparently run out of things to chatter about for the moment and was walking backwards, studying Harry with eyes as bright as a squirrel’s.

Harry chose the least harmful lie. “I committed a stupid error and got kicked out by my family.”

“No place to go, then?”

“No.”

“Don’t worry, Evanson,” Palmer said, and took Harry’s hand and shook it up and down. “You’ll find that you’re better off with me than you’ve ever been in your life! You’re my Felix Felicia, I just know it! We’ll be rolling in Galleons soon.”

“Felix Felicis,” Harry couldn’t help correcting.

“Yeah, one of them things.”

*

That was one beginning.


	2. Another Beginning

“How was governing the ungrateful world today?”

Albus rolled his eyes as he removed the scarf from around his neck and extended his hands to the fire. He shivered, despite the heat pounding out from the hearth. The older he got, the more the wind bit. “I’m still handling it better than you would have, Gellert.”

“Being ready to kill everyone has its good points, you must admit.” Gellert raised a lazy eyebrow at him from where he lounged in a huge golden-and-red chair. Well, at least it had been golden-and-red when Albus left for the office. Gellert had changed it to plain black since then. “I would have been more efficient.”

Albus sighed and sat down on a chair in front of the flames. “There are more important things for the Wizengamot to consider than being efficient, Gellert,” he muttered, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“What’s really wrong, Albus?”

“The fools in the Ministry who think that Severus Snape is some kind of powerful Dark wizard and want him either imprisoned in Azkaban, or growing up under Ministry control.” Albus slumped back with a hard huff of breath. “_Those _are the ones who deserve your particular brand of justice.”

“Severus Prince, now, I heard. His grandparents changed the name.”

Albus nodded. “Yes. They didn’t like that, either. There were some who said that he should always be identified by the name that his mother gave him, to ensure ‘continuity with the history books’ or something like that. As though Ebenezer Greengrass even knows what history _means._”

Gellert chuckled lightly, but his gaze didn’t waver. “And that’s all? Greengrass’s understanding of history, or rather his lack of it, has infuriated you, and there’s nothing else?”

Albus shook his head, tightened his mouth, and stared into the fire.

Gellert moved so that he was standing beside Albus’s chair, but he didn’t interrupt his gaze. He never did. “Something that perhaps has to do with blood family and how they’re not always the best ones to leave a child with?”

Albus shut his eyes. “I don’t feel like discussing this tonight, Gellert.”

“Such a shame that your wants don’t matter in this situation. We’ll talk this out now, or I’ll be woken up from sleep tonight by you shouting Ariana’s name.”

Albus jerked around, furious, but Gellert just met him stare for stare. When he wanted to, Albus privately admitted, Gellert could still by the handsomest man in the world. White had touched his golden hair, and his eyes had a faded whiskey color now, but it didn’t matter, not with the way his face glowed.

He stared down at Albus as if he were the sun, and the way he had all those years ago, when Gellert had sought him out with an apology and a determination, Albus melted. He closed his eyes and leaned back in the chair.

Gellert stepped behind him and began to massage his shoulders. “You were thinking about her,” he said, this time not like an accusation.

Albus nodded wearily anyway, the weight of the past crushing him into the chair. Again he could see Ariana dying from the curse that he might not have cast, but which he was going to take responsibility for. Again he could hear Aberforth shouting at him about how he didn’t deserve a sister like Ariana, not when he would have given up taking care of her to travel the world with a budding Dark Lord. “Yes. The Wizengamot takes it for granted that no one would ever harm someone of their own family. Greengrass had the bollocks to tell me that I would understand better if I had an heir of my own blood.”

Gellert’s fingers didn’t become like claws, but Albus knew they would have, were he anyone else. “I do wonder if Greengrass has troubled the world long enough.”

Albus said nothing. The vows Gellert had made, the spells they had cast, ensured that was only an idle threat. Still, Gellert would be able to make Ebenezer’s life miserable, and at the moment, Albus hardly felt sorry for the old fool.

“And so the Princes have changed their grandson’s name,” Gellert went on as though the rest of the conversation hadn’t happened. “One would think that would _please _Greengrass, with all his reverence for family.”

“He thinks the parents matter more,” Albus said. “Or at least the wizarding parent. And she chose to give up the Prince name.”

“Plus, I suspect that this will make it harder for the Ministry to control the child, whereas if he had no living family, he couldn’t be renamed and he would remain a Ministry pawn with whoever they chose to place him with.”

“Yes,” Albus said, with a long sigh. “Not to mention that Ebenezer tried to use Ariana against me when I told him that I was sure the Princes were competent guardians.”

Gellert gave a long, low laugh. “Then he’ll have nightmares of his own tonight, won’t he?”

Gellert’s vows were loose enough to permit such a thing, so Albus only shrugged. “He was the most persistent and personally insulting, but I actually hate the ones who were recommending Azkaban for a fifteen-month-old more. You have to admit,” and here he got in his own dig, “that the British Wizengamot has their own particular reasons to fear a Dark Lord arising from a young man.”

“But we all agreed that Azkaban wasn’t an appropriate punishment.”

Since at least a third of Albus’s own nightmares revolved around the moment when Gellert had knelt in front of him and sworn his surrender—nightmares that it had gone differently, that Gellert had managed to trick him, that it hadn’t happened at all—he only nodded in agreement.

“Tell me who the ones were who wanted Prince in Azkaban. The same ones who wanted to punish me?”

“You know most of _those _are dead or retired now,” Albus muttered, but he obliged. “Arcturus Black. Abraxas Malfoy. Lucietta Dagworth-Granger.”

“Dagworth-Granger surprises me,” Gellert admitted after a moment. “I would have thought that she could understand the value of letting a child grow up with his parents.”

“She hasn’t been the same since the rest of her family died. She’s obsessive about protecting that niece of hers, and she’s convinced the best way to do that is to snuff out any hint of a Dark Lord ever rising.”

“Even if it means driving another child insane or killing him?”

“Even then.”

Gellert snorted. “Then that makes me glad that you have no children of your own. It seems to make people focused on the welfare of their own family and ignore others’ more often than it makes them choose a future worth fighting for.”

Albus shrugged. Normally he would have been fair, he would have brought up the times when he had seen concern for one’s children translate into concern for all children, but it _had _been a long day.

“The house-elves have roast beef prepared under a Warming Charm,” Gellert said, changing the subject with a lack of grace he usually demonstrated only when it was the two of them. “Come eat, and we can think about how to pay the idiots back without violating my vows.”

*

As he had known he would, Albus dreamed of the moment when Gellert had surrendered that night.

Albus strode across the golden battlefield, golden with the fire he had called and mastered. Every flame that swayed around him danced in the shape of a phoenix, all of them cleansing and purifying. The soldiers that had followed Gellert had passed through those flames. They had cast down their wands and knelt with their hands behind their backs, willing to be punished for their crimes.

It had taken Albus years of work to perfect that spell. Purification magic was common, but it was meant, most of the time, to remove stains and smoke and blood. Few spells worked on a human’s soul, and fewer of those were of the kind that Albus would employ, the kind that would grant a _true _redemption.

Albus did not tear apart their souls or force them to obey his will, the kinds of spells that had existed before he made the Phoenix Fire. Instead, he lifted the criminals to an objective point-of-view and showed them the harm their actions had done.

After viewing those, most of the troublemakers were ready to surrender of their own free will.

Albus halted in front of Gellert, who still stood tall. The wand he carried, of blackthorn and thestral hair, dangled in his hand. It was a special wand, one made to Gellert’s exacting specifications by Gregorovitch, but it was no match for the Elder Wand, which Albus held at his side.

It had also taken years of work to make the Elder Wand cast the Phoenix Fire spell correctly, instead of corrupting it to drain others of their magic or crack their minds. The Elder Wand had always been a tool of destruction.

But it was no match for a man who had sought redemption for himself, and sought the wand to strengthen the chains of his own principles.

Gellert stared at him, his golden hair hanging ragged in his eyes. The Phoenix Fire ringing the battlefield was more golden, but, Albus had to acknowledge, he might have made the spell in memory of that hair.

“What exactly do you think I’ll do?” Gellert asked.

Albus sighed. His body ached. It had been a long battle, that misty day in 1937, on a battlefield still ravaged by the Muggle Great War. “I don’t know, Gellert. I know that you’re going to surrender and we’ll find a place for you in the world we’re creating, or you’ll go to prison. Or maybe die. I wouldn’t put that past you.”

“This brave new world of yours has no place for executions, Albus?”

“That you can quote a Muggle work shows—”

“Shhh,” Gellert said, and winked. “All of _them _think it’s my genius for turning a phrase.”

“It shows that you might not be entirely lost,” Albus finished, determined to ignore Gellert’s ability to sidetrack the conversation. “Come, Gellert. Will you not either surrender or submit to the Phoenix Fire? One or the other.” He was aware that this might end with Gellert’s death. He didn’t want it to, but the possibility was there, breathing the same air as the possibility of Ariana’s death had before it happened.

Gellert shook his head slowly. “I have no intention of submitting to your mind-wrenching curse.”

“Then I suppose it will be a duel.” The Elder Wand felt like a boulder in Albus’s hand.

“Oh, no.” Gellert dropped the blackthorn wand on the ground and spread his hands. “I surrender. I simply have conditions.”

“People who surrender cannot set _conditions, _Gellert.”

“Oh, I think you’ll find these more than acceptable,” Gellert purred, leaning towards him. Albus ignored the way that the sunlight shone on his hair. He only had to remember the blood Gellert had spilled to resist the enchantment. “I want you to personally take charge of me and my trial. If I’m issued a punishment other than Azkaban, I demand to be released into your custody.”

Albus looked at him, long and steady. Gellert might not want to go through the Phoenix Fire, but Albus would have thought he’d want to avoid Albus’s custody even more fervently. He had to know how Albus would hold him to his word and make him face his failings. “Why?”

Gellert gestured with one hand. “I failed on the battlefield. The next best way to change wizarding society is to be close to the most powerful man.”

“It’s not ever going to be like it was, Gellert.”

“Of course it won’t be. You grew up and embraced _responsibility_ for some reason. But I want it to be like what it was.”

Albus shook his head. He could only assume that Gellert wanted to try and manipulate him again. _Fine. He will fail. _“If I agree to this absurdity, will you kneel in surrender?”

“I’ll _always _kneel to you, Albus.”

Albus did not blush, but only because he’d had years of practice at resisting the temptation by then. He watched as Gellert knelt in front of him and put his hands behind his back, the way the others subject to the Phoenix Fire spell had been doing, and sighed when an Auror gingerly clasped holding chains around his wrists. Yes, all right. The thing that had seemed so impossible for years was becoming a reality as he watched.

Gellert looked up at him and ran his tongue along his lips in a gesture Albus knew to be deliberate. Albus didn’t flinch. Gellert pouted slightly about that as the Aurors, clustered around him like sheep who couldn’t believe they had a wolf chained up, urged him to his feet.

“You are going to have to observe my trial,” Gellert said.

“I know that.” Albus let his voice slow in confusion. Gellert could take little advantage of that, the way things were right now.

“So you’ll have to look at me, listen to me, and hear my arguments for why I did what I did.” Gellert’s voice remained low and precise, but his eyes were shining in the way that Albus had learned to distrust with all his being. “Do you think you can withstand it? Who will convert whom, when we’re in close quarters together?”

Albus laughed before he could stop himself. The smile froze and cracked on Gellert’s face like rotten ice.

“You can’t compete with the dead, Gellert,” Albus said, shaking his head a little as he moved away from his one-time lover. “Her voice is stronger than yours.”

And it remained strong as he watched the Aurors herd Gellert—always keeping at least a foot of distance between them and him—towards the station set up with hastily-made Portkeys. Ariana’s death had been Albus’s fault, whoever actually had cast that fatal curse, but her voice slowed and quieted a little as she watched the other half of the equation taken away.

*

And here and now he woke in bed and reached out to feel Gellert breathing next to him.

_Funny how these things work out, _he thought, and he honestly couldn’t tell if that thought was in his own voice, or Ariana’s, or Gellert’s.

But Gellert was either playing the longest of long games Albus had ever seen, more than twenty years in the making, complete with Occlumency shields that would foil both Albus’s probing and those of every other Legilimens in the Ministry, or he was sincere. He had given in. He had admitted his crimes and served his time in Azkaban and then in Albus’s custody.

He had become Albus’s lover and then husband. It was a game, maybe, but when you could no longer tell the game from the reality, Albus thought wearily, what was left?

“Did you feel it?”

Albus’s thoughts had intertwined enough with the past that the first, absurd thing his mind jumped to was that Gellert had thrust some kind of blade between his ribs and was asking him if he had felt the cut. Then he realized that there was a twanging sensation in the back of his mind, something that seared and became more like a fire the longer he thought about it.

“Yes,” answered Albus, disturbed. That was the kind of change to the fabric of reality he had felt only when he wielded the Elder Wand. He sat up and frowned at Gellert. “Do you know what it is?”

“No. Only that I’ve felt something—approaching, for the last half-hour or so.” Gellert was lying with his arms tucked behind his head, frowning. That was unusual. If Albus sat up, most of the time Gellert had to achieve the same height at once to be equal to him. “Like someone coming down a tunnel of pure magic from another world.”

“Or another time,” Albus breathed, and his heart gave a sharp thump. There had been two accidents with Time-Turners in the past ten years that the Department of Mysteries had barely stopped before they could spread and unravel reality. It had been enough for Albus to support a bill banning research into time travel when it went up before the Wizengamot.

“Maybe.” Gellert raised himself on his elbow. “Could anyone have stumbled on the research just casually, though?”

“No. All the Unspeakables who showed some signs of wanting to keep their notes and spread the research were _Obliviated _and forced out of their jobs. Imprisoned, in a few cases, when they wouldn’t stop trying to propagate it.” Albus’s fingers tapped on his knee in agitation. “Of course, we have no proof that this is time travel.”

“None except the exquisite sensibilities of two powerful and fully-trained wizards.”

Albus nodded slowly. It was unlikely that most other people had even noticed the sensation, unless they were trained in both time travel (which Gellert had made his followers research) and powerful enough to feel a disturbance in reality.

“What are we going to do about it?”

“Go back to sleep.”

Gellert rolled his eyes. “I meant in the future, Albus. I’m not demanding that you leap out of bed and storm the Ministry tonight.”

“I don’t think it came from the Ministry,” Albus said slowly, closing his eyes and reaching out with his will. He laid his hand on the Elder Wand, and felt a strong pull leading him in the direction of London, but…the more he concentrated, the more he was certain it didn’t come from the Ministry. No, it was aiming in the direction of Diagon Alley. “No, it didn’t. It came from Diagon.”

“Really?” Gellert huffed a breathless laugh. “I suppose you can go and inquire in the morning if anyone has opened up a mysterious shop selling ancient artifacts there.”

“You read too much Muggle fiction,” Albus said, and couldn’t help the fondness in his voice. He lay down and reached out to drape his arm gently over Gellert’s chest. “Go to sleep. We _will _deal with it in the morning. You can even come with me, if you like.”

“I’d like that,” Gellert murmured, closing his eyes. “You only want me for my expertise in forbidden magic, of course.”

“Of course.”

Though Gellert fell asleep before him, the soft, steady sound of his breathing was one of the major reasons Albus followed him so quickly.


	3. The Prince Prodigy

Seneca Prince studied his grandson closely. Meanwhile, Mariana sat on the other side of the room with her hands folded in her lap.

“You cannot learn much from a child’s face,” was something Seneca’s father had said often. But Seneca considered that you could learn much if you only tried to read it. His father had never tried, and had perished in a duel with a rival that his eldest son could have told him he would not survive.

Severus was black-haired and black-eyed, like Eileen. He had nothing of the Muggle in his features, from what Seneca could tell, though admittedly he had only seen the man dead on the floor. His stillness was impeccable, something Eileen must have been training into the boy. Seneca had seen children who were squirmy at the age of fifteen months and whined and complained if the adults around them did anything but slave for their entertainment. Severus was not like that.

Seneca drew his wand. Severus focused on it, but still didn’t move. A small shiver had run over him, though. Seneca wondered idly if the boy was remembering half-images of the Dark Lord’s wand, or if Eileen had perhaps used hers to clean and discipline the child.

Seneca cast a nonverbal spell with a quiet flick. Officially, there was no way to determine if a child had magic or not until their eleventh birthday arrived with or without the Hogwarts Eater. Officially, pure-blood families clung to hope that their children might not be Squibs until that final, damning day.

There were many things about the Prince family that were unofficial.

The room filled with pulsing purple darkness, and Seneca’s awareness moved outside his body. He focused his attention on Severus. If the boy did have magic, he would see light inside his body. It would look like an empty silhouette if he did not. And although Seneca was almost certain his daughter’s strength would have prevailed over common Muggle mud, still, he was not arrogant enough to assume he simply _knew _that and commit the Prince family’s resources to raising someone dead inside.

The blaze that reached out to him made Seneca smile, as much as he could in a mostly bodiless state. Golden and white light eddied and flowed back and forth in Severus’s chest, along his limbs, up to his head. That it wasn’t gathered in one place and staying there was another excellent sign. It meant Severus would command more of his power and would probably start showing accidental magic younger than most children.

Not that Seneca intended the “accidental magic” to be accidental for long. Such happenstance did not befall a member of the Prince line.

He canceled the spell and returned to his body. “He has magic,” he announced to his wife, picking up their grandson and subjecting him to a gentler hold this time. “We can raise him.”

*

Mariana Prince shut her eyes for a long moment.

She felt things in layers, and always had since she had married Seneca. There was the relief that their grandson had magic, that a daughter who had failed them in other ways hadn’t failed them in this. There was a distant sadness that the boy was a half-blood and would receive teasing from other children whose obsession with purity would make them see nothing but his heritage.

But underneath that—the emotions that Seneca would find if he examined her thoughts with Legilimency—there was silent rage. It had brooded ever since Seneca had exiled Eileen for marrying a Muggle, never seeing that in his daughter’s face was the reverse side of his own stubbornness.

She stood now and reached out her arms. “Do you want me to take him to the nursery? I don’t think we should allow the elves to handle him.”

“Really? Why not, my dear?”

The dark eyes that turned to her were the eyes of a hunting predator. Mariana gazed steadily back and said with the cool flippancy she had learned as a child, “We let the elves raise Eileen, and look how that turned out.”

Seneca hesitated only once before he held Severus out. “Very true, my dear. Take him, then.”

Mariana nodded and gathered Severus close. Severus gazed up at her, eyes narrow and a faint line down his forehead as if he was working up the nerve to scowl at her. Well, truly, it was hard to separate that line from the lightning bolt scar that he bore.

Mariana carried Severus in silence to the nursery, untouched and laid under Preservation Charms since the day that Eileen went to Hogwarts. Then, she and Seneca had not discounted the thought of more children, or of Eileen moving back in with them to raise her own young ones (since of course anyone she married would understand the honor in taking the Prince name and living in such a large manor). Mariana used her hawthorn wand to clear away the Preservation Charms and placed Severus in the large cot that Eileen had used until she was two. From the way Severus dragged himself upright with his hands on the bars, he might need a bigger bed than this soon. He was a sturdier child than Eileen had been.

“Thank Merlin you are,” Mariana breathed, “or you would have died when the Dark Lord invaded.”

She spent some time clearing away the still air, arranging the toys in new piles, and summoning an elf with orders to bring a breakfast of cut-up fruit and small pieces of meat fit for a child. She turned back to find Severus watching her. So far, he hadn’t said a word. Even Seneca had attributed that to the child’s shock after watching his mother die in front of him, but Mariana thought it just as likely that he was deliberately holding his silence.

“Would you like to come here?” Mariana asked, but she wasn’t surprised when Severus shook his head. “All right.” She sat down on the chair where she had rocked Eileen as a baby and took a deep breath, folding her hands in her lap.

Then, never touching her face or concealing herself in a way that might look suspicious if Seneca were suddenly to come into the room, she finally allowed herself to weep for her daughter, who was gone.

*

“Albus Dumbledore. How good to see you.”

Seneca kept his voice utterly flat and devoid of emotion as he let the Minister into his house. Albus never indicated that he noticed the coldness. He only nodded to Seneca and then looked around as if admiring the beams of the roof and the paintings on the walls.

The paintings included portraits of the Prince ancestors, of course, but only the ones who did what Seneca told them. He had ways of dealing with the ones who did not.

“What are you doing here, _sir_?”

Dumbledore turned back to Seneca. Seneca had to stifle his own annoyance as he felt cold magic arch above him like a waterfall made of snowflakes, ready to come down. Dumbledore ruled partially because he was the most powerful wizard in the world. He had once acted cheerful and twinkly-eyed, but that persona had been destroyed by the rigors of war.

“I came to see young Severus and how well he’s adapting to life here, of course.”

“I fail to see why you should have any more interest in him than any other boy his age.”

“You are smarter than that, Seneca. You know what some members of the Wizengamot think about him, and what they wanted to do to him, rather than leaving him to your guardianship.”

Seneca inclined his head as he led Dumbledore into the drawing room meant for unwelcome guests and flicked his fingers, summoning a house-elf. “Tea for two,” he said, and then turned back to Dumbledore. “I also know that I have you to thank for my ability to keep my grandson with me.” The words curdled on his tongue, but they were true, and a Prince always paid his debts.  
“Yes.” Dumbledore didn’t dwell on those debts, which might be the only thing Seneca liked about the man. He sat down with his hands folded in his lap and gave a single polite sip to the tea that the house-elf brought, then put it down again and said, “I wanted to see how strong your defenses were.”

Seneca narrowed his eyes, but tried not to hear a threat in the words. Not even Dumbledore would fight so hard to see his grandson given to him only to immediately take him away. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t trust some of those in the Wizengamot at all. They might attack you for the boy.”

“We have strong defenses,” Seneca said, and hated the way he wanted to cringe when Dumbledore drew his wand. The damned Elder Wand, the infamous Deathstick, which had been utterly tamed by Dumbledore’s will.

“You will forgive me if I test them?”

_I will not. _But Seneca bit back the words, and nodded curtly. Dumbledore waved his wand, and the magic raced around the room, invisible but tangible to someone who commanded the Prince wards the way Seneca did, touching and sampling.

It was uncomfortable, like having a hand on his naked chest, and Seneca was more than relieved when Dumbledore put the wand away. “I’m impressed, Mr. Prince. Severus should be safe here. Good.” And then he frowned into his teacup in a way that made it clear this was about more than such a simple visit.

“What is it, Minister?”

“Three nights ago,” Dumbledore said quietly, “both Gellert and I felt time ripple as someone came through. I was afraid that it might be part of an attack on your grandson, that either Voldemort’s followers had discovered some sort of time magic or someone was using it against your wards. Did you feel anything?”

Seneca tried not to feel flattered that he was being considered equal to such powerful wizards in their ability to feel magic, and instead only shook his head, concentrating on the actual question Dumbledore had asked him. “No. I know that time magic is forbidden…”

“Which hardly stops most people.” Dumbledore finished his tea and stood with a frown. “Very well, Mr. Prince. Then it is possible that time traveler, whoever he was, had nothing to do with your grandson. I hope that’s the case.” He paused. “May I see Severus before I leave?”

Seneca didn’t want to agree, but once again, there were certain things that one did when confronted with Albus Dumbledore and certain things one did not do, and this was one of the latter. He smiled and nodded. “Of course. Tipsy!”

One of the elves, who had been waiting with the boy in her arms since Seneca had known Dumbledore was coming up with the path, Apparated into the room. The Minister leaned in and stared at the boy. Seneca found himself holding his breath. He exhaled in annoyance. There was no way that Dumbledore could bestow a blessing like the mages of old. Just because he was powerful, Seneca had to stop revering him, especially if he intended to instill a proper sense of pride in his grandson. A Prince bowed to no one.

“Such dark eyes,” Dumbledore whispered, in a doting tone that made Seneca abruptly wonder how much he missed being Headmaster of Hogwarts. He turned and nodded to Seneca. “Very well. Thank you. I will look for our time traveler elsewhere.”

Seneca saw Dumbledore to the door himself, as he had let him in. “Thank you for stopping by, Minister.”

“Thank you for admitting me, Mr. Prince.” Dumbledore paused with a hand on the banister of the steps that led down from the door. “A word of advice. Children do better when raised with love instead of sternness.”

“I hardly think so,” Seneca said, startled into replying when he had meant to let the man go in dignified silence. “We raised Eileen with love, and we indulged her so much that she indulged herself by running away to marry a _Muggle_.”

“I wonder,” Dumbledore said, looking over his shoulder. Sunlight coming through the front door lit up his silver hair. “Was she indulging herself, or was she escaping?”

Seneca narrowed his eyes as Dumbledore let himself out. Only the Minister for Magic was powerful enough to get away with implying that anyone would _ever _need to escape from the luxurious lifestyle the Prince family could offer its descendants.

_No one will ever let Severus escape, and he will never need to, _Seneca vowed to himself as he turned back towards his grandson’s rooms.

*

Mariana hesitated for a long time before she finally stepped into Diagon Alley and wrapped her cloak more firmly around her face. There was an illusion on her face beneath that and a subtle charm that would nudge people not to remember her without being an outright _Obliviate_, but she still trembled.

It was worse that Seneca should find out the purpose of her visit here than that he should find out she had come. She had never revealed her family’s talent to anyone. The knowledge slumbered in the back of her mind behind impenetrable shields that only owed as much to Occlumency as a snowflake owed to a blizzard.

Seneca would want to use her for the gift. Other people would want to kill her. And they might want to kill her grandson, too, although as far as Mariana knew, no one not actually born with the last name of Peverell had ever inherited the talent to tell when someone had traveled through time and track time travelers.

Now, she opened the shields that she had kept closed since the death of her father five years ago and sent a single pulse of seeking down the alley.

For a moment, the buildings around her rustled and blurred, and it looked as if she was walking through a silvery-pale fog that had leaked from their walls. In that fog, Mariana lifted her magic and looked around. Ordinary people, those born in this time, would look like shadows moving through it. There would be a clear circle around the time traveler.

And there he was, although to all appearances, he was one of the most ordinary of the ordinary, a dark-haired man who looked unfavorably tousled, coming out of a shop that was so new it still had no name and shutters over the windows.

Mariana drew back into the shadowy corner opposite the shop and watched. The silver fog faded as she locked away her magic again. She studied the man, and saw only a flowing cloak, black hair that looked as if he had run a comb through it but backwards, and tatty glasses that he pushed up with one finger.

“You might as well come out, you know. Those spells don’t work on me.”

Mariana sucked in a frightened breath. The man had spoken without looking at her, still wandering down the middle of the alley and looking at a scroll in his hands that resembled a map. But he had _spoken_. He had known she was there.

No one should have, except family. But Mariana had it on excellent authority that she was the last direct-line descendant of the Peverells.

She hesitantly matched steps with the man, who didn’t look around until they were in an alley off the man one. Then he leaned an elbow on the wall and considered her frankly. His eyes behind the glasses were an astonishing shade of green.

“Who are you?”

“I should be asking you that question,” Mariana murmured. The man didn’t look like someone who had studied esoteric magic for a long time to break the barriers of time and space. “Time traveler.”

The man tensed at once, and stopped seeming ordinary. Mariana gasped as his hand whirled to his wand, and the air around him gleamed with a magic that was like the glint off a blade. Then the man seemed to gain back control of himself, and shook his head in irritation as he dropped his hand from his wand.

“I promised myself I wouldn’t do that,” he muttered. “But how did you know?”

“Ancestral magic of my own,” Mariana said, which was far as she was prepared to discuss it. “You must not fear that anyone has tracked you in the same way. But you are in danger if found.”

The man nodded. “I’ve done some research since I’ve been here. I know that they’ll probably put anyone they think deliberately traveled in time to death.”

“Time travel was not forbidden where you came from?” Mariana asked, since she had always wondered. She had met a time traveler only once before, and only briefly.

“You could say that. More that we didn’t know enough about the consequences.” The man looked at her, and there was something dangerous about him that continued to glint, despite the mildness of his eyes. “Now, I do have to know who you are.”

“Mariana Prince.”

The man froze for a second. “You mean the grandmother—you must be his grandmother—of Sna—the Boy-Who-Lived?”

Mariana nodded and took a deep breath. “And I fear what my husband will try to do to my grandson. I want you to promise that you’ll protect him.”

“Of all the people in this world you could ask that of, you come to _me_, someone who would be the most hunted fugitive in your society if people only knew?”

“I know that you must be powerful, to have survived a journey back in time. And sensible, not to have announced yourself and immediately tried to change things, the way most people who historically have traveled in time try to do.” Mariana shifted her shoulders, disliking the way the man stared at her. “Do I have your promise?”

The man closed his eyes and seemed to commune with himself in silence for so many moments that Mariana feared what his answer would be. But then his lips shaped words she could read.

_Why not? Maybe I came back for this._

Wariness rose up in Mariana’s heart. The man didn’t even know why he was here? Someone that uncertain would not be a good protector for Severus after all.

But then he looked at Mariana, and nodded. “I vow it.”

The world around them rang as if they were all inside a crystal globe and someone had nearly knocked it off a table. Mariana found herself falling to her knees. The man came over and grasped her hands to help her up. Mariana shuddered a little, fighting back the temptation to cower away, and stared at the man. “Who _are _you?”

“You might as well call me Harry Evanson. Most people will.”


	4. Harry, Again

"Who's she, mate?"

Harry smiled weakly at Laocoon as he sat down at the table just inside Diabolic Defenses. (He had tried to get Laocoon to change the name, but Laocoon had just said that they needed a memorable name, and this was _memorable_). "Someone who wanted my help."

"But that's once. She's been here almost every day." Laocoon's eyes traveled up the stretch of Diagon Alley right outside the window as though he could still trace Mariana Prince's path.

Harry sighed and leaned back. In general, Laocoon didn't ask that many questions, because he regarded Harry as his token of good fortune and thought he might leave if he didn't get what he wanted. But Harry knew that he wouldn't get away with answering _some _of these questions. "She's someone from my past. Listen, you can't tell anyone about this, okay?"

"That's fine!" Laocoon beamed at him and set up a sparkling-strong Privacy Charm on the door, such that the normal noises of Diagon Alley suddenly dimmed. "Just tell me whatever you want to tell me, Harry!"

_Which is nothing, _Harry thought, but he lowered his voice as though he didn't trust the Privacy Charm. "She was a friend of my mother's. My mother, she was...different from what other people thought she should be. She caused a rift in the family."

Laocoon's eyes lit up. "Did she have mysterious magical powers like you do?"

"I do not have mysterious magical powers," Harry began, but cut himself off with a sigh when he saw the beginning of a pout forming on Laocoon's face. He seemed utterly convinced that just because Harry had stronger skills in offensive magic and could cast some spells that were original to his universe but didn't seem to exist here, Harry was some sort of magical prodigy, or hidden wandering mage doomed to crisscross the country, "you know, like a comet, except on earth."

"She was like me," Harry restricted himself to saying. It was even true, at least if you were just talking about eye color. Harry ached as he thought of all the ways he _wasn't _like his mother. Lily Evans wouldn't have broken the universe.

"Ooh." Laocoon sat on the table that he had used earlier to put together an adamantine shield and swung his legs. "And this Marian woman knew her?"

Harry managed a wan smile, impressed that Laocoon actually remembered the name that Mariana had chosen as a cover. It wasn't foolproof, but then again, she never gave her last name, and Laocoon would have announced it in an excited voice if he'd had any idea who she was. "Yes."

"Is she part of the same secret brotherhood of sorcerers that you and your mother were?"

_Merlin, it's hard to even lie to him without him coming up with a _better _lie. _"You could say that."

Laocoon nodded. "And don't tell me! She's coming here to give you dire warnings against betraying any secrets to me!" His eyes sparkled as Harry eyed him in disbelief. He honestly couldn't imagine being that young.

"That's only part of it," Harry temporized. Maybe that would cover Mariana's visits here, especially if Laocoon kept the secret to himself from the sheer pleasure of having it. "The other part is that there's a young--sorcerer I have to swear to protect."

"Oooh! And you're reluctant to fulfill your duty because you think I'll keep you too busy in the shop!" Laocoon sat up proudly. "Please don't worry about it, Harry. I'll be happy to give you any time off that you need."

"_What_? No, I'm not reluctant to fulfill that duty! I just don't think I'll...do a very good job." Harry let his voice trail off as the words sounded in his ears and he finally named the source of his reluctance even to himself. Mariana shouldn't have had to answer so many of his doubts, especially since he was the one who had put Severus in this position, and yet, she had.

_Shit. I really might mess this up. I broke the entire universe. What makes me think that I'd be a good protector for _anyone?

"I think you'll be perfect for it, Harry."

Harry looked up. Laocoon had leaned forwards to pat his shoulder. His smile was bright, if a little condescending. Harry shook his head. "You don't know me that well, Laocoon. It's nice of you to say, but--"

"No. I'm sure you'll do fine."

Harry paused. Laocoon looked as sure as Neville had when he cut Nagini's head off. _When he used to cut it off, or when it had once happened_, Harry thought then. "Why?" he couldn't help asking, despite the fact that he didn't think he'd share Laocoon's unshakable certainty even if the man explained it to him.

Laocoon smiled. "You're a protector."

"_You_ are, though. I'm good with offensive magic--"

"Which can make someone a good protector." Laocoon sounded calm now, and much older than he usually did. "And you care about people. It's obvious from the way you talk with this Margaret person. And me. And that girl I saw you give all those Sickles to the other day, the one who was hungry."

"So because I make foolish decisions out of impulse, that means I _have _to be a good protector and capable of accepting this destiny?"

Laocoon pointed a triumphant finger at him. "Even _you _think it's destiny."

Harry sighed and leaned back in his chair so that it came near the glass window at the front of the shop and Laocoon sat up in concern. "Well, maybe not that way..."

"You said it. You can't take it back. You _said _it." Laocoon all but bounced in place, then abruptly became serious again and nodded importantly. "Maybe it's only because we're coming out of a war, but did you notice that not a lot of people have those charitable impulses?'

"_You _do."

"When?" Laocoon looked around quickly as though beggars would crowd out from behind the walls of Diabolic Defenses any second.

"When you took me on."

"You had me worried for a minute there, Harry!" Laocoon pressed a hand against his chest. "That wasn't charity, that was employment, and I hired you because my Divination professor _said _so."

Harry just sighed and decided that discussing his continued employment at Diabolic Defenses probably wasn't helping anyone. "Fine. Well, I don't want you to have to constantly reassure me. And I already agreed to accept Marian's petition for protection, so I can't back out now."

"Marian? I thought her name was Margaret."

Harry smiled in spite of himself, even though he thought this was probably a pretense and no one could be as naive and silly as Laocoon seemed. "Marian. Thanks for talking it through with me," he added, even though Laocoon hadn't really said anything he needed to hear. He'd still made the effort.

Laocoon leaped up from his chair and clicked his heels together, bowing his head. "You're welcome, Harry! Now, about that Shield Cloak." He picked up the heavy steel shield from the center of the table. "If you could come with me, then maybe we could try firing curses at this and getting ready for the cloak."

Harry frowned as he took the shield. "Do you want the cloak to be made of steel, though?"

"If necessary. What do you think of an overlapping pattern of steel scales? We could make it look like a trout's. A salmon's, of course, is right out."

Harry rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. Laocoon hadn't come close to replacing Ron and Hermione, and never would, but it was good to know that he had a friend.

*

"It took me a while, but I have Severus here. Seneca doesn't actually pay attention to him most of the time, unless he wants to pose for a picture for the paper with him in his arms. He thinks the house-elves are bathing him right now."

Mariana seemed utterly determined to make Harry hold the toddler, so Harry swallowed and extended his arms. Severus stared at him in silence as Harry steadied him on the counter that ran along the side of his small room at the back of Laocoon's shop, which was kitchen and bedroom in one. At this age, he should be talking, and Mariana said she was sure he could, but apparently Severus hadn't uttered a word since the day he had seen his mother killed in front of him.

_And why should he? _Harry thought wearily as he met the black eyes under a lightning bolt scar it was strange to see from the other side. _He has enough people trying to manipulate or trick a reaction out of him. Maybe he wants to see what they'll do when they don't get it._

"Severus, this is Harry Evanson, who has promised to protect you," Mariana said. Her voice was soft and nervous. She was standing on the other side of the counter, and she seemed smaller now that her grandson was out of her arms. "To teach you magic, and watch over you, and make sure that you survive to adulthood and defeat your enemies."

Harry twitched as she laid it out like that. It wasn't that he objected to doing it, in principle. It was simply that it hadn't been part of the oath that Mariana had had him swear.

"But he doesn't want to."

Harry's head snapped around, and he ignored Mariana's soft cry. He focused on Severus, who was glaring at Harry with the most intense look he'd ever got from him, even counting the first day of Potions class back in his original universe. _That _Severus had had his gaze clouded by bitterness and his sureness about what he would see.

"He doesn't want to protect me," Severus said, and reached to poke his finger for a second into the side of Harry's cheek. He faced Mariana. "You should find someone who _wants _to protect me."

Harry swung Severus to the floor, so that he could go back around the counter to his grandmother if he wanted to, and stared at her. "No one should be talking like that at the age of fifteen months," he said.

"Well, he's nearly seventeen months old now--"

"_What did you do to him_?"

Mariana straightened her back, while Severus frowned at Harry but made no move to step away from him. "Don't yell at her."

"It's not what we did," said Mariana, twisting her hands. "I-it's something that Eileen did. I found the evidence of it on Severus the first time I gave him a bath. I think she was terribly worried that her son would turn out to be a Squib, since she married a Muggle. So she used runes on his skin, and probably fed him certain potions, the kind of thing she could do without a wand and that wouldn't be obvious to her non-magical husband--"

"I see. What did they do?"

"Modified him," Mariana said, softly enough that Harry had to strain to hear her. "Made him smarter, and gave him the ability to _think _through things that no normal child of his age should be able to."

"I don't want to be normal," Severus announced. "It sounds boring."

Harry managed a shaky smile, even as his mind raced. What kind of mother would do that because she would rather have an _altered _child than a Squib one? "It was pretty boring when I was a kid."

Severus turned to stare up at him. "Why was it boring when you were a kid?"

He repeated Harry's words almost exactly, down to the intonation. Harry ignored his own uneasiness and smiled at him. "I lived with Muggle relatives. They thought being normal was the best thing on earth. They wanted me to be, but my magic wouldn't let me. So I decided that I would be something better than normal, and normal was boring."

"Your mum was a Muggle?"

"No, she was Muggleborn, but she died when I was young," Harry said quietly, and then wondered if he should have. He had given a very different story to Laocoon, after all. But Mariana knew he was a time traveler, and she seemed much more focused on what he could do for Severus than questioning him about his past. "So I lived with her sister. My aunt."

"What about your father?"

"He died at the same time as my mother."

"So he wasn't there to protect you."

Harry shook his head. "Things were pretty bad for me until I got my letter and went to Hogwarts. But that's one reason I want to help you, if I can. If you'll let me protect you," he added. It seemed clear that the choice would be up to Severus, this time, instead of Mariana.

Severus folded his arms and paced back and forth. He shivered slightly. Harry cast a Warming Charm in the air above him, wordlessly, because he thought any charm cast on Severus's robes right now wouldn't be a good idea. Severus still looked at him as if he knew what Harry had done.

Mariana stood with her hands pressed close to her mouth and her eyes brilliant with something that looked like wary hope.

"What do you want to protect me from?" Severus asked, looking up. "I live with my grandparents. Not my aunt."

Mariana started to shake her head, but Harry was already answering. If he was going to be Severus's protector, and Severus was like this, then he owed his loyalty to Severus first. "Your grandfather. He doesn't sound like a pleasant person."

Severus considered that in silence, then nodded. "And who else?"

Now Mariana _really _looked as though she wanted to tell Harry to shut up, but Harry answered freely anyway. "The people who will want to you use because you're the Boy-Who-Lived."

"What would they want to use me to do?"

"To make themselves popular and win popularity contests." The minute he said it, though, Harry was unsure if he should have phrased it like that. What if he made it sound as if these people _weren't _really a danger to Severus?

Severus tilted his head back and locked his eyes with Harry. "How can you stop them?"

"With magic and knowledge." Harry felt more and more like this was an interrogation, but he didn't feel tempted to smile. Severus's eyes were utterly serious, and Harry thought he owed him the courtesy of taking this seriously.

"What kind of knowledge?"

"Some of that is about magic, too," Harry admitted with a shrug of his shoulders. "But the other stuff..." He bent down towards Severus, noting the way he curled his lip at the word "stuff." Apparently he wasn't impressed with Harry's vocabulary. "If I tell you a secret, can you keep it to yourself for the rest of your life?"

Mariana cleared her throat. From that, and the red tint to her cheeks, Harry thought that she probably hadn't told Severus he was a time traveler.

"Yes," Severus said. He looked at Harry with such old eyes that Harry was suddenly sure that he'd kept many secrets to himself already. Maybe about his parents, maybe about the Princes.

Harry's uncertainty, not fully quelled even by conversations with Laocoon and Mariana, abruptly snapped into place. He _had _to do something to help Severus. He would do whatever it took. Severus desperately needed someone on his side.

"Then I'll tell you," he said, and leaned towards Severus, casting another wordless spell that would prevent Mariana from listening in, if she was even trying. "The main reason that I know about this is that I used to be the Boy-Who-Lived."

Severus's eyes widened for the first time since the conversation had begun. "Are there--lots? Do you get a new Boy-Who-Lived every generation?" he whispered seriously, tiptoeing towards Harry and looking like a real child for a moment.

"Not like that," Harry said. "I was one in another world. But it was the same thing. Voldemort killed my mother and father, and my mother sacrificed her life to save me, and I had a scar like yours on my forehead."

Severus stared at him. "But you don't have that scar now."

Harry pressed his wand against his forehead and peeled back a section of the glamour he'd taken to wearing the morning after he'd come to this world. It was a risk, but without the context of the conversation, he didn't think Mariana would know what he and Severus were talking about. And the scar was little more than a faded dark line at the moment, anyway.

Severus stared harder. Then he reached up a hand, trembling with something that Harry hoped was wonder rather than fear, and ran his fingers along the edge of Harry's scar as Harry bowed his head down towards him.

There was a weird sensation all through the room then, and Harry realized later that he would probably never know how to describe it. The closest he could come was likening it to someone playing a drumbeat in his head. Severus's hand dropped, and he shivered next to Harry, confirming that he'd felt it too.

"I don't know what happened," Severus whispered. "I don't know what I want to do. I don't know what you should do."

He stepped back and met Harry's eyes with a fearlessness that overwhelmed Harry. "But I'll trust you."

Harry put a hand on Severus's shoulder and smiled, since he thought trying to embrace him would be misunderstood by everyone in the room, including Mariana. "Thank you. I'll do the best I can to keep you safe."

"What did you tell my grandson?" Mariana asked, her face uneasy.

Harry shook his head as he stood up. "I'm afraid that I can't tell you that without his permission, and I don't think that he'll give his permission."

"No," said Severus, in a snotty tone that was more the way Harry had thought he would behave as a child. But he met Harry's eyes, and smiled, and the drumbeat sensation traveled through Harry again.

_For this, _Harry was thinking, _I would give up almost everything. _


	5. Learning

“I already know that spell, Grandfather.”

Seneca paused and stared at Severus. It was true that he was no ordinary child, and Seneca had supposed that the Prince blood had bred true even through Eileen’s unfortunate wedding to a Muggle. He spoke like a child several years older than he was, he understood adult subtleties in a way that meant Seneca rarely had to speak to him twice, and he could read already, although he was only twenty-seven months old now, a year after his mother’s death.

But he had never said this sort of thing before. Seneca had thought he was smarter than that.

“You cannot know this spell, Severus,” he said patiently. “Neither I nor your grandmother have ever cast it in front of you.” Mariana would not have _dared._

“I saw Mother cast it.”

Seneca studied his grandson in silence for a second. Severus was sitting in a chair on the other side of the library table, albeit one with several padded pillows on it to prop him up to the right height. His eyes were quiet and dark, as always, but his hand closed into a little fist on the table.

“Why would she have cast a ward that is meant to silence a room, Severus?”

His grandson watched him, and then said, “Because she wanted to practice magic, and didn’t want the Muggle finding out.”

Seneca half-relaxed. At least Severus had taken enthusiastically to calling his father “the Muggle,” and never sought to use any other name for him. “And you can remember the movements of the wand?’ Seneca had cast the spell wordlessly, which meant Severus could not be sure this was the same incantation.

“Yes, Grandfather.”

Seneca hesitated only once before he reached over and handed his wand to Severus. “I want to see you cast the spell.”

Severus listened for a second, his head tilted to the side, which Seneca had come to recognize as a gesture that he used often himself, almost communing with the magic. Then he said, “This wand doesn’t like me, Grandfather.”

Seneca grunted. Part of him was proud that his grandson was smart enough to recognize a wand’s affinity, or rather the lack of it, at such a young age.

The rest of him was suspicious enough to scream. He leaned forwards and asked softly, “Who told you about wands not liking you, Severus? Was it your grandmother?” That was not on the list of approved subjects he had told Mariana she could discuss with Severus.

“No one told me, Grandfather.” Severus sounded genuinely puzzled. “I can just feel it. The wand doesn’t like me. It doesn’t want me to hold it. It wants me to put it down and go away.”

Seneca slowly eased back from his desire to call Mariana down to the room. “Very well. Then put it down in the middle of the table and make the wand gestures with your hand.” He glanced at the scar on Severus’s forehead. He did wonder, sometimes, if the residue of the curse had caused some change in Severus, as well, if he had managed to boost his power by stealing some from the Dark Lord.

Severus nodded and laid down the wand. He slowly raised his hand, moving his fingers as if he didn’t know if he should align them all or not, and then he decided to and waved his hand around with all his fingers aimed in the same direction.

Seneca fought down the instinct to snarl as he watched the heavy air swirl and dance. Ripples ran towards the corners of the room and died out. In the end, not real magic, not a silencing ward, but there was power there that his grandson could call upon.

Seneca looked back at Severus, realized the boy was waiting for him to respond, and gave him a tight smile. “Well _done_, Severus.”

Severus beamed and soaked up the words, and Seneca nodded, letting his half-smile substitute for the full one he might otherwise have given. He had given Eileen full-hearted gestures like that, and it had built up her confidence to the point where she had thought she could openly disagree with him, even run away, and still be forgiven. Seneca was not about to make the same mistake with this generation of Princes.

Not that he would, he thought as he called the elves to take Severus up to the nursery. This time, he had much finer material to work with.

*

“Grandfather was having me practice a silencing ward.”

Harry focused thoughtfully on Severus as he set down a tray of cheese and bread on the table between them. “Did he have you handle a wand?”

“He tried to get me to use his. But it didn’t like me, so I didn’t use it.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. “That’s unusual magical sensitivity to have so young, but I’m not surprised.” He took his holly wand from his pocket and tossed it to Severus. “Touch this one and pretend that you’re going to cast a spell with it. Don’t move it in the right way yet. Just think about it.”

Severus gave him a suspicious glance as he picked up the wand. “I could cast it if you wanted. I could do that.”

“I know, but right now, I just want you to see what it feels like to you, and what happens when you hold it.”

Severus closed his eyes and waited for a long moment. His fingers tapped back and forth across the wand. Harry watched curiously. He had thought he might get something of a twinge when Severus touched his wand, but it seemed the connection was neutral.

“This one likes me more than Grandfather’s wand did,” Severus murmured, his eyes closed. “But…” He waited for long enough that Harry wondered if something was wrong, then looked at Harry again. “It doesn’t feel like your real wand.”

Harry froze. At the same time, he heard an impatient rattle from the cupboard at the back of Laocoon’s shop, where Harry had stored some things that he didn’t want to tell anyone about.

“Where is your real wand?” Severus asked. He sounded interested and not impatient, and he handed the holly wood back to Harry and then looked around the room. “Can I meet it?”

Harry managed to smile. “I suppose it would be all right,” he said, and walked over to the cupboard to open the door. He barely had time to get it out of the way before the Elder Wand sprang directly into his hold, radiating brilliant golden light.

“_Wow_,” Severus breathed, sounding awed.

Harry had to shield his eyes against the light, it was glowing so. Then the glow died, and he was left with an ordinary-looking wand of elder wood—or at least as ordinary as it could look if you didn’t know what it was. He took a deep, difficult breath.

Of course it couldn’t be the real Elder Wand. Dumbledore openly carried that one, and Dumbledore was the Minister. Harry had assumed, when he came back in time, or broke the universe, however one wanted to refer to it, that he had left the Hallows behind as well. Certainly the Invisibility Cloak hadn’t made the journey with him, and the only wand he’d had with him had been the holly one.

But then one morning, a few days after he’d agreed to vow his protection to Severus, the Elder Wand had shown up lying on his doorstep. Or a good copy of it. Harry had swept it inside, thrown it in the cupboard, and then waited tensely for the newspaper stories about how Minister Dumbledore had lost his wand.

But no such stories had spread. And the photographs that came out in the papers, which often showed Dumbledore with his wand, hadn’t changed.

The Elder Wand had reproduced itself, or had come with him through time, or something like that. Harry supposed he would never know for sure. He did know that it was getting more and more difficult to perform magic with his holly wand, which was _ridiculous_. He had refused to carry the Elder Wand, hadn’t used it since he stuck it back in Dumbledore’s tomb in his original world. What did it think it was doing, showing up on the doorstep like a lost Crup?

“Can I see it?” Severus asked.

For a moment, Harry tightened his hold on the Elder Wand, and projected a thought to it as hard as he could. _Hurt him and I’ll find a way to burn you to ash. I don’t care if it takes me as long as I’ve got in this life._

For a moment, the wand warmed in his hand, to the point where it was painful. Harry didn’t know why, but he kept holding it, and after a second, the heat died away. Harry nodded and turned to Severus, ignoring the slightly wary look on his face. He still had that expression no matter how careful and gentle Harry was, but given the bastard that was his grandfather, Harry could hardly blame him.

Severus took the wand and turned it back and forth curiously, not gasping the way Harry would have expected if he had been able to sense its power. Then he nodded and handed it back to Harry. The Elder Wand vibrated, and a tone like the edge of a phoenix’s song showed up in Harry’s mind.

“That one feels like your real wand,” Severus said in some satisfaction.

“Well, good,” Harry muttered, and tossed the Elder Wand back in the cupboard. Then he shut the door and turned around to find the Elder Wand lying on the table next to the holly wand. He drew in a long, slow breath.

“Why did you hide your real wand in the cupboard, Uncle Harry?”

Harry smiled at Severus, his pleasure in the name overtaking his annoyance at the question for a moment. Then he sighed and said, “I won the wand from someone, but I didn’t really want it. The holly wand is the one that chose me when I was eleven. That’s the one I chose back, and the one I want to use.”

Severus studied him with quiet, intelligent eyes, and then shook his head and said, “I don’t know if you can do that now.”

Harry didn’t know what he meant until he reached out his hand and touched a mere dead piece of wood. He swallowed. All warmth was gone from the holly wand, as if it had been burned out by the Elder Wand’s warning. He desperately snatched it up and tried to perform a spell, but not even sparks came out.

“Why would it do that, Uncle Harry?”

“I don’t know.” That made no more sense than the Elder Wand following him through times, Harry thought. It _might _have made a little sense if he had woken up here with the Elder Wand and not the holly one, but why would it stop now?

“I think the real wand is the one that chooses you now.”

Harry glared at the Elder Wand. How could he use _that_? It was so recognizable. Maybe not to people in most worlds or times, but people who were used to seeing Dumbledore’s wand in the papers would notice in seconds.

“Why are you so upset, Uncle Harry?”

“It looks like a wand that’s famous,” Harry said reluctantly. He wouldn’t drag Severus into all his troubles, any more than he intended to tell him all the details about his time travel, but he didn’t want to deny him explanations, either. That would encourage Severus to distrust him faster than anything else. “People are going to think that I stole it and get upset if it turns out that there’s just two of them.”

Severus leaned forwards and studied the Elder Wand intently. “It’s powerful, right?” When Harry nodded, Severus looked up at him with wide eyes and asked, “Then you could make it just look like something else, right?”

Harry blinked. Maybe he could. Of course, that would mean he was willing to work _with _the Elder Wand instead of against it.

But if his holly wand really wouldn’t work for him anymore, he had no choice. He refused to leave himself or Severus defenseless.

Harry sighed and picked up the Elder Wand. For a second, it shone, and Harry didn’t think it was his imagination that it went white and transparent, resembling Voldemort’s yew wand more than anything else.

Then it stopped shining, and it looked exactly like an ordinary, stubby wand of dark wood. Probably a little shorter than the holly one, but no one would know that unless they actually laid that side-by-side and compared them. Harry relaxed. Except to Laocoon, Severus, and Mariana, he simply wasn’t important enough to anyone here for them to do that.

“Thank you, Severus,” he said. “That was a good idea.”

“It was?”

Severus sounded so uncertain. Harry turned and knelt in front of him. Severus was an extraordinary child, but still _only _a child. And he didn’t get the kind of emotional support that he needed at home with his Prince grandparents, even if he got intellectual admiration.

“Yes, it was a good idea,” Harry said quietly. “I hope that you never think I’ll lie to you. There are certain things I shouldn’t tell you because they might hurt you, but I won’t lie to you and say something I don’t mean.”

Severus stared at him with big eyes, then nodded. “I’m hungry. Can we eat some of the lunch that Grandmother brought?”

Harry nodded and reached for the pile of cheese and bread that Mariana always sent with Severus. She appeared to think that he might starve between the time that she placed him in the shop with Harry and the time she gathered him, even though those were usually short periods of time to avoid Seneca Prince noticing. But Harry wasn’t insulted by her caution, not really. With someone like her husband in the mix, it paid to be cautious.

“I like studying with you better than I do with Grandfather.”

Harry rested his hand for a second on Severus’s dark hair. “And I like being with you, Severus.” _Strange and confusing though my existence in this world usually is. _Even after a year here, Harry didn’t think he was really all that close to understanding the changes.

*

Orion had sat with his eyes closed, for hours, in the hidden room behind the black oak paneling in his library. When he sat like this, he drifted. The silver bowl in front of him, on the plinth in the center of the room, radiated light, and it was the only thing that could tell him when to wake up.

And when to come here. It summoned him, and he would open his eyes in the darkness of his unhappily shared bedchamber and know that the bowl had filled with glowing liquid starlight and that he was to come.

Now, a picture formed on the surface of the darkness behind his eyes. Orion waited, and didn’t let his surprise when the image divided in two raise him from the trance he needed to use to sit there.

There had never been two images before, but then, as far as Orion knew, there had never been someone in his family who could do this, either. He breathed in, he breathed out, and the images gained form and definition.

Both were faces.

The one on the right was the face of his wife. Orion didn’t bother studying Walburga’s glazed dark eyes, her heavy piled hair, or her slightly-parted lips. He had seen her face like this for several months now, at least in the hidden room. She had never looked like this in real life, but he had faith that someday she would.

The one on the left was no one he knew. The man’s hair was nearly as dark as a Black’s, but far wilder. His eyes had a deep green shine to them that stirred Orion’s memory, even though he was sure he had never seen this man before. He was half-turned in the image, looking as if over his shoulder when his name had been called.

Orion was examining him in deep absorption when the starlight breathed out a name. _Harry Evanson._

That _was _enough to break his concentration—the bowl had never spoken to him before—and Orion’s eyes snapped open. The bowl on the plinth was empty. Orion sat back and took a long, stilling breath.

He didn’t understand why this room existed, or why the bowl summoned him here sometimes and gave him visions. He wasn’t even sure that they _were _visions. He knew the people and actions he saw would be important to his life at some point, but that was all. Given that most of the time he saw people he already knew, he didn’t know if he was glimpsing the future or not.

Nor did he know if he was the only Black who had been in this room, summoned to dream in front of a bowl filled with starlight that appeared and disappeared. There were no records of this room anywhere in the library, nor had Orion heard any family member mention it, but several of his relatives could well have come here for years and kept the secret. That would be like the Blacks.

Orion stepped back through the door, shutting it behind him and watching it blend seamlessly with the wall. Then he started as a wail broke the silence of the house.

“Daddy! Daddy!”

Orion made his way immediately towards the nursery that held two-year-old Sirius and his infant brother Regulus. He came up in time to clasp his hand around Walburga’s wrist as she raised her wand towards the children.

“No,” he said calmly.

“You don’t know what they did!” Walburga spun towards him with her eyes bright and mad.

Orion sighed and prepared himself to both listen to his wife and defend his children. Walburga’s madness had only been incipient until after Regulus was born, but the crying of their sons seemed to derange her senses.

Part of him that no one would ever be able to see, no matter how skilled a Legilimens they were, kept thinking about the Harry Evanson he had seen, and wondering if the man might be able to help with this problem somehow. Perhaps Orion would end up hiring him as a tutor? But then again, why would he, when his last name indicated he was a Mudblood?

_But somehow, he must be able to help with this. Otherwise I might go mad myself. _


	6. The Houses of Black and Potter

“You ought to get out, Harry. Date something.”

“You mean some_one_?” Harry asked, a bit amused, as he watched Laocoon critically study the new gloves he had been constructing. He had asked Harry to conjure acid that the gloves could stand up to. So far, Harry’s spells were still more powerful than any material Laocoon had tried to make the gloves out of, but he had great hope of the adamantine-infused dragonhide, apparently. Now he had just had to deal with the gloves being too heavy to comfortably wear.

“What?” Laocoon glanced up, blinking. “I mean, yeah. If you want to.”

“Just that you said some_thing_, first. I wanted to know what you meant.”

That got him another befuddled glance. “Well, I thought you must be pretty choosy, because you’ve never dated anyone so far. So I thought maybe you were looking for a half-Veela or a goblin or something like that.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “I could just not want to date someone, you know. And half-Veela and goblins and so on are not _things._”

“Not wizards, either.” Laocoon stuck his tongue out between his lips as he began to work another lacing of adamantine into the dragonhide. He had a process of making the metal like silk and sewing with it which Harry thought was worth more than all the defensive gadgets he was trying to make, but Laocoon had just gaped at him, looking a little offended, when Harry had tried to say that he should concentrate on developing that. “So I included them just in case you’re looking to date a horse or something.”

“A horse,” Harry said flatly.

“I mean, centaurs had to happen _somehow_, Harry.”

Harry shook his head. Sometimes Laocoon was too close-minded and too open-minded at the same time. “I’m going out for a while.”

“Good! Go have fun. Just take them back to their flat, please. I’m trying to get some work done here.”

Harry rolled his eyes and left the shop, making sure to lock his own little flat behind him. Laocoon wouldn’t intrude unless he had a good reason, but sometimes someone sauntering around Diagon Alley after darkness tried to get in, apparently just to see if he had something worth stealing.

Harry wandered towards Gringotts, glancing into the windows around him. He almost never bought anything here, except clothes now and then. Laocoon shared his food and his books with Harry, and Harry worked in the shop and tutored Severus and kept his head down. There wasn’t a lot of other things he _should _be doing, he thought. He’d probably mess up the world if he paid too much attention to other aspects of it.

But now his arm was itching. In fact, his whole _body _was itching, which was annoying. Harry frowned and started to take out the Elder Wand, only to feel it tug insistently towards the left. Harry turned as if to inspect an old necklace that was lying on a cushion in the shop window in front of him, and watched sharply out of the corner of his eye.

His first thought was that Dumbledore was here, but the Minister rarely went anywhere without a retinue. Instead, two families came around the corner. The first was a tall, dark-haired man who looked vaguely familiar, holding a toddler boy on his hip and leading another by the hand. The second—

Harry nearly swallowed his tongue.

They were Potters. They _had _to be. Harry could have been looking into a mirror if he’d just looked at the top part of the man’s face. He was old, with iron-grey hair, but he still looked confident and strong, as did the thin, blue-eyed witch next to him. And he wore glasses. And he had a messy-haired, hazel-eyed boy with him.

_James. _

Harry immediately turned around and walked in the opposite direction, ignoring the painful tugging of the Elder Wand that probably meant his _grandfather_—except not here, Harry reminded himself sharply—had the Invisibility Cloak with him. He was absolutely unequal to meeting them right now, and he had no right to stare at them, anyway. They weren’t his family in this world. He couldn’t drag them into his problems.

He heard them talking behind him, but he didn’t make out the words because of the indignant shriek that rang out over the Alley in the next moment.

“Orion! How _dare _you remove the boys from the house without telling me?”

Harry dropped into a defensive crouch without even thinking about it. He was familiar with that voice, though admittedly only when it had screamed at him from a portrait on the walls of Grimmauld Place. He glared at Walburga Black, her hair hanging wild around her face as she advanced on her husband and sons.

“Walburga,” the man who must be Orion Black began in a calming voice. Harry stared despite himself at the boys who had to be Sirius and Regulus. “We discussed this. I told you that I was coming to the Alley to look at toys for Regulus and get Sirius’s eyes checked by that Healer—”

“And you met up with the _Potters!_ _Light _wizards! It’s as if you’re _trying _to raise our sons as disgraces to the House of Black!” Walburga wasn’t moving fast yet, but her slow stalk towards Orion was menacing enough all on its own. She had her wand brandished over her head. “This is an alliance meeting, not a shopping trip!”

James’s mother—Euphemia Potter, Harry knew her name—spoke next, her voice calm and bright with scorn. “As if you would ever raise your sons the right way either, Walburga. You haven’t changed since Hogwarts. Screaming and pouting when you don’t get your way, and hurting others’ eardrums. We were only going to discuss the boys playing together and perhaps becoming friends in the future. Merlin knows your sons need more education than immuring them in your old house can give them.”

Walburga stared at Euphemia in a way that made Harry hope she hadn’t fully understood what the other woman had said. And then she unleashed a ripping scream and spun her wand in a circle Harry was intimately familiar with.

“_Avada K_—”

That was as far as she got before Harry cast the Lasso Curse, coiling an invisible magical rope around Walburga’s ankle and yanking as hard as he could. The spell cut off as Walburga catapulted to the ground, and her wand rolled away from her. Orion Black immediately Summoned it to him and tucked it in a robe pocket.

Harry sighed and leaned back against the side of Flourish and Blotts. He didn’t think anyone had seen him cast the spell, since it had been wordless, too. And really, it could have been anyone in the crowd that had gathered to stare.

He couldn’t let Sirius or Regulus or James or his pseudo-grandparents be hurt, but honestly, he couldn’t get involved any further than this.

“I’m ashamed of you, wife,” Orion said, his voice even more contemptuous than Euphemia’s had been. “We are going home, and we are going to _discuss _this with Father. I doubt that he’ll see your side.”

Harry breathed out slowly. He didn’t know what had happened to let matters with Walburga reach this point, but at least if Orion was going to divorce her or get his father involved, then she probably wouldn’t be able to do whatever she liked whenever she liked. Sirius and Regulus ought to be safe.

“I’m so sorry about this, Fleamont, Euphemia,” Orion was saying when Harry paid attention again. Walburga was standing in front of him, arms clasped stiffly at her sides and eyes full of a hatred that Harry knew meant she must be under Binding and Silencing Charms. “I hope that you don’t think too badly of my family for what happened today.”

“Never, Orion.” Fleamont Potter had a game smile that Harry thought he remembered seeing in the Mirror of Erised. “We’ll discuss this again soon, and toast to a more prosperous future this time around. Come, James.” He picked up his son, who had been standing wide-eyed beside him, and carried him in the direction of what Harry knew was an Apparition point. Orion, meanwhile, was cradling Regulus close and stroking Sirius’s hair. At least Sirius didn’t actually seem to be crying, the way Harry had thought he was at first.

Harry sighed. Well, he had done his good deed for the day, and he should be getting back to Diabolic Defenses. Laocoon was prone to getting orders around lunch from the kind of young Ministry flunkies who wanted to buy either items to defend themselves from pranks or to play pranks on their friends.

“Wait.”

Harry froze at the words that seemed aimed at him, in Orion Black’s voice, but then shook his head and continued walking. There were still plenty of people left around the area, craning their necks while pretending to be window-shopping intently. Orion hadn’t noticed Harry and couldn’t mean him.

“I saw what you did,” the same voice said, and a hand clasped Harry’s arm, gently but inexorably drawing him to a halt. “I want to speak with you.”

Harry stood still for a second, and then let his mouth droop open a little and his eyes widen with surprise. He turned around and made a flustered bowing motion that stopped because of Black’s hold on his arm. “You’re that Black bloke, right?” he blurted. “It’s an honor, sir, an honor!”

*

Orion felt his own eyes narrow a little. The expression of awed stupidity on the stranger’s face didn’t match, at all, the expression he had seen the night that the Divination bowl called him to the hidden room in Grimmauld Place. Which meant it was most likely a pretense.

“Yes, my name is Orion Black,” he said. “These are my sons, Sirius and Regulus. And I know your name.”

He didn’t miss the stiffening of the stranger’s arm under his hold, or the wary flash in his eyes. But Evanson continued to maintain a slightly hanging jaw and wide eyes that might have fooled someone who didn’t know him well. “How could you, sir? I’m honored to meet your sons, honored to meet you, but I’m sure that you couldn’t have met me before. I’m just a humble shopkeeper’s assistant.”

“Your name is Harry Evanson,” said Orion. “And you were the one who saved Euphemia Potter’s life, and perhaps more lives than that, if my _dear _wife had been permitted to cast that spell.”

Evanson abruptly turned to the side, pulling hard, and forcing Orion to let go of his arm. It was hard not to gape at him. He was an incredibly different person in seconds. Now he looked like someone who had fought for his life before, and expected curses more than insults. His hand rested on the wand that projected from the holster at his waist, and his body was coiled, tense, poised.

“How do you know who I am? No one knows that.” Evanson’s magic sparked for a moment on the edge of his wand and then dimmed, but Orion knew better than to think that he was weak. That spell he’d performed on Walburga hadn’t been the most powerful Orion had ever seen, but it had been strong, quick, and _quiet. _

Orion swallowed and held Evanson’s eyes. They were remarkable eyes, a much deeper green than he’d seen from the vision. Unfortunately, they also glistened with distrust right now. “My family has some Divination gifts. I never expected mine to show me someone like you, but they did, recently.”

“In what context?”

“Trying to figure that out has given me some problems,” Orion admitted, and watched Evanson drew himself further away. “I mean no harm. But you’re going to be important to the future of my family, and I want to figure out how.”

Evanson sighed and put his wand away, which relieved Orion, since Sirius had started to fuss in the way he did when he was frightened. “I can’t be important to the future of your family.”

“I trust the Divination more than I trust your denial,” Orion began.

“I don’t mean it that way, although I do happen to know people who put too much trust in prophecies. I mean that I have other commitments, and I—I have already harmed your family, and you don’t know it.”

Orion overcame his instinctive response to that assertion, which would have been to draw his wand, and shifted his hold on Regulus. Sirius leaned against his leg and stared up at Evanson. He didn’t know the full context, Orion thought, but he would demand an explanation as soon as they were home.

Much the way that Orion wanted to demand an explanation now. “What do you mean by that?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“You _will_,” Orion said, and concentrated to infuse his voice with the magical version of compulsion that he had been born with. No one had ever realized what he was using, partially because he’d been wise enough to never use it on a Legilimens or anyone else capable of detecting it, and partially because most people feared him anyway and thought they were just obeying their natural desire to tell the truth to someone as important as a Black.

The compulsion flowed like steam over Evanson, whose eyes shifted darker still. “I’ll thank you not to try and compel me like that again.”

Orion stared at him in silence, then asked, “Are you a Legilimens?”

“No. But I can resist the Imperius, and this was weaker than that. And I think I’ve made up for the harm to your family by saving your ally’s life and possibly the lives of you and your sons if your wife would have been mad enough to attack you. Now, _pardon me._”

Orion swayed. What had struck at him when Evanson spoke wasn’t exactly like compulsion, since it was focused on the body and not the mind, but the urge to obey was overpowering. And the air around Evanson had begun to glint with the storm-like force of his magic again.

But Orion wasn’t a weak wizard himself, and Evanson hadn’t put the strength behind the order that he could have. _Probably doesn’t like affecting other people that way, _Orion thought, and frowned at the man. “I will come with you.”

“You can’t possibly want to,” Evanson said, voice sharp with contempt. Only the thought that some of his contempt was focused on himself kept Orion from reacting. “And you should realize that, as someone who harmed your family and someone you have to know isn’t a pure-blood, associating with me will do you no favors.”

“Is that a threat?” Orion asked quietly, and smiled a little when Evanson hesitated. “Right. I’ll come with you, if you have obligations.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“But I owe you a life-debt.”

“Not when I had harmed your family in the first place.”

“An interesting thing magically about life-debts,” Orion told the air. “They’re active when the person who owes them recognizes them, not the person they’re owed to.”

“I’ve never heard that.”

_If you’re a Muggleborn, I wouldn’t have expected you to, _Orion thought, but bit the snide thought back. He was going to have to get used to thinking about Muggleborns and people who hadn’t grown up in the wizarding world differently, or it was sure to cost his family. “I need to talk to you and figure out what you’ll do to claim the debt and what you would never do.”

Evanson continued staring intently at him for a moment, and then sighed. “You aren’t going to let this go, are you?”

“No, of course not. I wouldn’t be a man of honor if I did.”

Evanson hesitated and looked towards Orion’s bound and glaring wife for the first time, then down at his boys. “Shouldn’t I give you the chance to go home and—do something about this? Turn your wife over to the Aurors, if you’re going to do that?”

“Of course,” Orion said smoothly. “Thank you for thinking of it. Tell me where you work, and I can come and find you when Walburga has been secured and Sirius and Regulus are in the safe hands of house-elves.” He smoothed his hand down Sirius’s wild black curls, and his son stared up at him uncertainly.

“You won’t like the name of the shop where I work.”

“Mr. Evanson, shall we stop playing games with each other?” Orion tilted a crooked smile at him, and watched Evanson blink as he examined it. Perhaps charming him and convincing him to accept his duty as an ally of the family would be less difficult than Orion had assumed. “I know that you want me to ignore you and walk away, and not claim the life-debt. That’s not going to happen. The sooner you accept and absorb that, the sooner we can be good friends.”

Evanson sighed. “There are so many things that I can never tell you, including the original way that I harmed your family. I don’t see the point in trying to become allies with secrets hanging between us.”

Orion shrugged and then readjusted the snoozing Regulus to a more comfortable position. “I hope you don’t imagine that I tell all of my allies the secrets of the House of Black. It’s a sensible precaution that you’ve taken, but one might not take it too far. Tell me where you work and what you do.”

“I work at Diabolic Defenses. I help cast the offensive spells that the shopkeeper, Laocoon Palmer, uses to test whether his defensive clothing and other items can stand up to actual curses.”

Orion kept his face neutral as he nodded. “I see. Well, I will join you there within the next half-hour.”

Evanson narrowed his eyes. “You ought to know that my mother was Muggleborn.”

Orion felt something in himself relax. He was more at ease with half-bloods than Muggleborns. “That is acceptable. Tell me where the shop is, Mr. Evanson, and I repeat, I will join you there within the next half-hour.”

Evanson spent a long moment studying his face. Orion wasn’t sure why, but he remained obediently still, letting Evanson perhaps search out the details he needed to have confidence in him.

Evanson finally blasted out his breath and nodded. “All right, sir. I’ll see you there.” And he turned and walked sharply down Diagon Alley.

Orion raised his eyebrow at Evanson’s back, more amused than anything at his abrupt departure, and turned back to his wife. She was still glaring at him, but her expression changed as she got a glimpse of his face. She would have stared at her feet or cowered, Orion thought, if she could have, under the binding spell.

“You endangered the future of our House,” Orion Black said softly. “I am…_most _displeased, Walburga.”

And that was all he would say in public, or in front of their sons. But the look in his wife’s eyes said clearly that she understood what he wasn’t saying. Orion smiled as he watched the ripples of her shivering disturbing the outline of the Body-Bind.

He was most going to enjoy what came next.


	7. The First Conversation

“It is—quaint,” Orion said as he looked around the flat that Evanson had led him into. Or, truly, not even a flat, only a room behind the shop where he worked, with one door on the far wall that probably led to a bathroom. In one corner was a small, neat bed, and a table took up most of the center. The table had scars on it that Orion associated with acids and curses.

Evanson nodded, a half-smile lingering on his lips for a second. “Well, it’s home.” He glanced at Orion, then around the room, as if he expected a house-elf to appear from somewhere. “Would you like some tea?”

Orion concealed his dismay at drinking something brewed in these surroundings, and nodded. There were chips missing from the _floor_, he saw from the corner of his eye. “It would be welcome.”

Evanson nodded, but no house-elf appeared. Instead, he went over to another, smaller table tucked in the corner opposite the bed and bent down to pull a teapot, cups, and the tea itself from a cupboard beneath it.

Orion took the chance to study the man’s movements. They were nothing special, he thought at first. Evanson was lean with muscle, but more like a Quidditch player than an Auror. His hair was untamed and shaggy, curling around his face in a maddeningly familiar way. He made the tea with motions adept enough to show that he’d endured these cramped rooms for a long time.

But Orion’s father had made sure that he had talents at looking beneath the surface, and that was what Orion did now.

Evanson kept himself perfectly balanced at all times, even when he had to kneel to get something else out of that wretched cupboard. His face gave little away despite his wide, glistening eyes. When he drew his wand to cast a charm to warm the water, Orion was sure that his hand had twitched in a way that indicated the wand was an afterthought.

By the time Evanson came back to the ugly table with the tea, Orion was ready to accept that the Divination bowl in his house had known what it was doing. He sipped the tea and admitted to himself that it was only the fourth-worst he had ever tasted. Evanson pushed a tray with sugar, lemon, and milk on it towards him and sat back. The tray had been silver once in a distant lifetime.

Orion put down his teacup and reminded himself, again, of the way his father had looked when Orion had deposited Walburga in front of him and related what had happened in Diagon Alley. Orion owed Evanson a debt for that moment of happiness. “You said you had wronged my family once already. How?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”

Orion didn’t rise, but he did sit back. Evanson had turned to look at him, and the mildness had vanished from his eyes. Now Orion saw the will that had let Evanson shrug off his wandless compulsion. For the moment, Evanson was still smiling, but he looked as though any second, he would strike.

“Perhaps you will tell me in the future?”

“No.”

“It is hard to have a duel of words with someone who issues simple refusals.”

“Then perhaps you should leave.”

Orion made himself take another sip of the tea, instead. Evanson was pushing hard to get Orion to leave him alone, despite the pretense of hospitality he had enacted so far. His teeth were all but bared. “Why do you want me to leave?”

“Because you don’t owe me a debt and it’s nonsense to say you do,” Evanson said flatly, his eyes a wild thing’s. “You’ll bring yourself and your sons misery by getting mixed up with me. Go away.”

“If you wanted me to do that, you could give me specifics.”

“What kind of father are you, that you’re putting your desire to find out more above the safety of your sons?”

Orion felt anger run like a current of hot water up his throat, and opened his mouth. The only thing that kept him from saying something was the softly-growing smile of satisfaction on Evanson’s face.

Orion settled back heavily in his chair and pretended to drink his inferior tea. “A father who has been passive for too long,” he said. “My wife cast some spells on our sons, but only ones—I thought—that she was permitted to cast as part of traditional discipline. I never caught her actually using some of the ones that would have meant I could divorce her, although several times I believe I was about to. And now this. She was stupid enough to attempt murder in a public place. Divorce is going to be quick and painless.”

Evanson watched him now with a blank face, utterly still. Orion could read his posture better than his expression. Evanson was ready to defend himself if someone came after him with a wand.

“Will you tell _me_,” Orion asked softly, leaning forwards, “why you are so determined to drive me away? If you will not tell me about the harm that you believe you have done to the Black family, then tell me why you believe that I owe you no thanks.”

“I did what anyone should have done.”

“What _I _should have done, I believe you are saying.”

“I would never have stayed married to a spouse that I believed a threat to my children.”

“Under wizarding law,” Orion said, anger moving cold and slow through his soul, “spouses have equal rights to their children unless one is _proven _a threat. And what happens in the privacy of the home cannot be testified about—they see it as forcing spouses to testify _against _each other—unless it happens in front of someone who is not part of the family, or unless one of a certain number of lines that are believed to damage children irreparably are crossed. You are unfamiliar with wizarding law, I believe, Mr. Evanson?”

“Yes. Because I’m not a ‘proper wizard,’ I’m sure you would say.” Evanson formed huge hooks in the air with his fingers as he spoke. “So you wouldn’t want to waste your time with me.”

“I have already told you that you cannot make me simply ignore you by pretense.”

“But this is as much reality as pretense.” Evanson leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs with an infuriating nonchalance. “I can’t be the kind of influence you want because the kind of influence you want is someone just _slightly _outside of the norm, someone who would care enough to interfere with your wife’s murder attempt but not enough to care that you hate people like my mother. I’m not that kind of person, Black. I care a lot about Muggleborns and I don’t think you do even if you say that word instead of _Mudblood. _I may be ordinary and pretty stupid, but at least I didn’t come out on the other side of an expensive education having learned _fucking nothing._”

Orion was still. No one had spoken to him like this before, not even the Mudbloods who had stood up to him at school because they were Gryffindors and he was a Slytherin. They would squeak about their rights, of course, but inwardly, they still shook with terror—and feared what he could do to them. Orion had always known that they were the common rabble who were only brave enough to attack in a mob.

There was absolutely no fear in Evanson. Orion could get him sacked from his job, or set Aurors on him with a word. There were a lot of people in the Ministry who would do anything to oblige a Black.

And still Evanson wouldn’t bend.

“You were a Gryffindor, I assume,” he said.

“You assume I went to Hogwarts at all.”

Orion flicked his fingers, incidentally using a bit of magic that Vanished the rest of the terrible tea. “Your accent is that of someone native to Britain, and you are highly magical. You would have attended.”

“Unless my parents couldn’t afford it. Unless my mother was someone who had an illegitimate child by a pure-blood, perhaps, and couldn’t send me because his family would have made her life even worse than they already did.”

Orion blinked rapidly. “You are illegitimate?”

Evanson smiled at him like a jaguar. “Why else would I carry my mother’s name?”

Orion had to sit still and think about that again.

*

_He’s buying it._

Harry didn’t do anything but smile. Still, he felt a slight clench of relief inside himself. Black had been annoyingly persistent, even after he knew Harry was a half-blood. And Harry couldn’t afford to deal in outright lies because he didn’t know how skilled a Legilimens Black was, although Harry basically assumed he must be one.

But speaking in hypotheticals stepped around the issue nicely. And while part of Harry mourned the chance he would lose to make contact with Sirius and Regulus, maybe even James Potter, he had no idea what their lives or their destinies were like here, in this broken universe. He had meddled enough. At least he could let them live as best as they could with their wounds.

“If we must end this association the same day we began it,” Black began in strangely formal tones, “then there are a few things I would like to understand. Things that only you can explain to me.”

“I already told you how little I‘m willing to explain to you.”

“Why did you stop my wife from casting the Killing Curse?”

“So that your children would be spared the trauma of seeing a murder in the middle of the street. And that other child would be spared the trauma of losing the woman I assume is his mother.”

“It was about the children.” Black studied Harry from under lowered eyelids. “I don’t think the harm you caused the Black family was deliberate, then.”

“Why?”

“Because you would know that I have children. And whatever reasons you might have for wishing harm on me, or Walburga, or my father, or any other adult members of the family, you would want to spare Sirius and Regulus.”

Harry grimaced. He had always been ridiculously transparent when it came to things like that, he thought. He shrugged after a moment. “It’s true that they didn’t do anything to hurt me,” he said, which was the most he was willing to give Black. “And I don’t wish them any harm.”

“But?”

“You’re presuming that I mean them some good.”

“You _do_, if you wished to stop their mother from becoming a murderer in front of them.”

Harry sighed and rubbed his forehead for a second. “I don’t have any money that I can give you to get you to go away,” he muttered. “I wish I knew what you _wanted_, besides answers I can’t give you.”

There was a long silence. Harry almost hoped for a moment that Black had got up and left, even though he would have heard the chair creak and the door open if that happened. But when he dropped his hand from his eyes and looked up, Orion Black was still sitting there.

With a rather different expression on his face.

“You were _trying _to get me to leave by telling me your background?” he asked in a softer tone, his fingers curling around his knee.

_Oh, shit, _Harry thought blankly for a moment, and then shook his head. This still didn’t mean that Black knew his real name or the real circumstances. Harry forced a sneer instead, draping haughtiness over him like the Invisibility Cloak. “You didn’t understand that so far? So much for pure-blood superiority.”

*

_How much of this was a ploy? And to what end_?

But at the moment, Orion’s indignant fury was enough to sweep away his concerns about _why _Evanson had wanted to manipulate him. It was enough to know that he had tried, and nearly succeeded.

“No one else I know would have thought the attention of a Black a thing to despise.”

“As I think we’ve established,” Evanson said, his voice clipped, “you know some pretty stupid people.”

It had been a long time since Orion had had to struggle with his temper. Most of the time, people were willing to cringe in front of him for a _scrap _of the attention he had already given Evanson. Now, though, he had to curb his natural reactions, since those reactions with the things Evanson wanted, and draw on the lessons in politeness that his father had drilled into his head as a child.

“If you would only let me know what I could do to win your regard,” he began.

“There’s nothing, you arrogant bastard.”

“_Video potentiam_!” Orion snapped, thoroughly fed-up, and watched the spell strike Evanson before he could move from his chair.

The charm was a simple one; it revealed the true extent of someone else’s magical power. It simply wasn’t well-known outside the Black family, and so neither was the countercharm. Evanson had no chance to cast it before the spell slammed into him.

Orion ducked his head, his hands over his eyes, as the room lit up. Someone could have torched the wall behind Evanson with a Conflagration Curse and cast much the same amount of light. Orion gasped through it and loosed the countercharm when he had had enough of his eyes being fried.

The room went dark and quiet again, quiet enough for Evanson’s words to be heard as the threat they were. “What did you do?”

Orion lifted his head slowly. Evanson was crouched in a battle-ready position, his wand aimed at Orion, his eyes wide and his lip curled so that he appeared to his bare his teeth in a snarl. But Orion would never compare him to an animal, the way Muggleborns and the children of Muggleborns, were so often compared. Not after that.

“I used a spell to sense your magical strength,” Orion said quietly. “Please sit down, Mr. Evanson.”

“The hell I will.” Evanson wasn’t moving and wasn’t standing. His wand remained aimed, and his voice deepened to a level that meant Orion would have moved out of his way if he’d met him in Diagon Alley. “_You’re going to walk out of here and forget that you ever saw me._”

“You can’t control me that way,” Orion said. “Neither can I control you. I apologize for ever attempting to do so.” He was a little breathless as he stared at Evanson. Normally, someone like this would have been discovered and pulled aside during his first weeks at Hogwarts by a Black family member attending school there. Evanson wouldn’t have been able to leave the school without being made an asset, ally, or even future marriage prospect, although of course he would have had to marry into a lesser branch of the family.

But because Orion had been the one who had discovered him, that meant it was up to _Orion_ to determine what sort of future relationship the Black family had with Harry Evanson. The freedom, the power, dazzled him.

Not to mention the chance to secure someone on his side who would challenge him and wake him to life as marriage to Walburga had not. Orion knew himself. The need to protect his sons would keep him awake for a little while now, but not for very long. And when the divorce from Walburga was done with, he would need a continuing prod to keep from sinking into a daze where he cared for Sirius and Regulus, made a few easy political moves, and did little else.

The Divination visions had sometimes done that for short periods, but Orion could not depend on them to arrive regularly. Now, however, perhaps they had brought him someone who would always be there.

“Then I accept your apologies, and you can _go away._”

“I think you know as well as I do that that tactic won’t work either, Mr. Evanson.”

The man closed his eyes in what looked like exhaustion. Orion ignored his own sense of wrongness, that nothing should ever make Evanson look like that. He could do nothing to help until Evanson gave up on this resistance.

“I’ve endangered your family so badly already,” Evanson said. His eyes flickered open and focused on Orion, the tiredness in them far more than this situation could have caused. “You don’t _know_. And I can’t tell you because it’s other people’s secrets as well as mine. I can’t even commit to being your exclusive ally. I have other responsibilities.”

“Then I won’t press for an explanation until you feel that you are ready to give me one.”

“And I just told you that that would be _never._”

“Things may change, Mr. Evanson.”

“Including how much value you feel I can add as an ally.”

“That is true,” Orion said. It cost him nothing to do so, not when Evanson was studying him with quiet eyes. He had hooked his fish. “But for right now, I could use someone who cares for children to aid in their education. Their mother has—cast spells that I didn’t know about, I’m certain. Someone who works for a Defense expert could probably find evidence of them more easily than I could. And have other knowledge worth offering to the House of Black.”

“I don’t want payment. What Mr. Palmer pays me to work in the shop is sufficient.”

“A Black is hardly going to _object _to the fact that you don’t want gold,” Orion said dryly, although he knew his father probably would. Arcturus had said often that the safest way to pay an ally was with money. But this was Orion’s decision. “There are other things I can offer you.”

Evanson nodded slowly. “All right. I—when should I come to your house and meet your sons? Or would you prefer to meet me elsewhere first and not invite me into a place that must seem almost sacred to your family?”

“Why do you think our home is sacred?”

“Isn’t that the way it usually is with pure-blood families?”

Orion let that go for now, but as he and Evanson discussed the particulars of the arrangement, curiosity burned in his belly. There were too many things he didn’t understand about this stranger, too many things he _wanted _to know and didn’t.

But he would take the chance anyway. He thought it would pay off in much more than Galleons.


	8. Intrigues of Love

“You still haven’t identified the time traveler that we sensed a few years ago?”

Albus shook his head and took off his cloak with a grimace. With a hiss, it landed on the hook next to the grey one that Gellert usually wore when he went outdoors. “The only good thing I can conclude from that is it’s someone who is making such small changes that they’re undetectable.” He sat down in the chair across the kitchen table from Gellert, who had a hot pork pie in front of him. “Where did you get that?”

Gellert gave him the smug look that he wore even when asleep. “I hired a house-elf.”

Albus narrowed his eyes. “They are not often for sale.”

“No. But there was someone who thought his elves deserved a new home, since he wouldn’t be able to offer them one much longer.” Gellert turned to the side and called before Albus could question him on that. “Izzy!”

A female house-elf appeared. Albus blinked. He had never seen one dressed like this, in a spiraling confection of silver gauze that hid her waist and her breasts but left the rest of her skin bare and shining green. Nor had he seen one who regarded him with such a haughty look in her eye.

“Mr. Albus is being _late for dinner_,” Izzy said. She made it sound as though he had just failed to defeat an opponent in a duel.

“I didn’t know what time it was,” Albus said, and then stopped. Was he really excusing himself to a house-elf?

Apparently, he was, because Izzy gave the barest snort that indicated she was graciously allowing herself to be mollified. “Mr. Albus will be on time in the future,” she said, which she made sound like a prediction made by Professor Shadow at Hogwarts. “Now Mr. Albus will _go clean his hands._”

Albus looked down. His hands looked fine, as they should when he’d been handling paperwork all day. “What’s wrong with them?”

“Washing hands for dinner is what _civilized beings be doing since the dawn of time._”

Albus blinked and went into the bathroom. As he was running water over his hands, and pondering how little soap he could get away with, he heard a throat cleared behind him and glanced over his shoulder. Gellert was leaning on the wall, the definition of concerned.

“I don’t think Izzy would like it very much if you showed up to her table with wet hands that haven’t been thoroughly cleaned,” he said innocently.

Albus shook his head and reached for the soap. “You let someone flee Britain and bought his house-elf to help him escape?”

“I assure you that _I _didn’t have much choice in the matter. Izzy took one look at me and declared that her place was with me. And she said something that made me curious.” Gellert leaned forwards to sniff the side of Albus’s neck, and Albus sighed and dabbed soap there, too. “She said it was the nature of time that had brought her to me.”

Albus caught his breath and met his lover’s eyes in the mirror. “Then she knows something about the time traveler?”

“I wasn’t able to confirm that so far, but I wouldn’t be surprised.” Gellert considered the side of his neck for a moment and nodded. “And you know that house-elves have powerful magic of their own that some wizards disregard. It wouldn’t surprise me to know that whoever this is, he neglected to hide his activities from a house-elf.”

“That is true,” Albus murmured. He picked up the towel and dried the side of his neck, then began to wash his beard. “I will be most interested to see what happens when Izzy serves us dinner.”

*

Dinner was an exquisite turbot in a butter sauce that Albus had never eaten before, despite how many years he’d been alive. He sat back in his seat with a long sigh and nodded to Izzy when she would have Vanished the dishes. “Will you sit with us and talk for a while, Izzy? I would like to get to know the newest member of our household.”

Izzy tilted her head and watched him from several different angles, then disappeared, appeared beside his chair, and looked at him from that way, too. “You be wanting to ask Izzy about the nature of time,” she said, and waved her hand. A small chair appeared next to Albus’s. Izzy climbed into it and carefully rearranged the silver gauze around herself. “Luckily, Izzy be wanting to talk with you.”

Albus gave Gellert a careful glance and saw him smiling as if everything had gone exactly the way he wanted it to. Then again, he always looked like that. Albus sipped at the dry white wine Izzy had served with the fish and nodded. “All right. Thank you, Izzy. What did you mean when you said that you had come to Gellert because of the nature of time?”

“Time be different a short while ago.” Izzy shrugged and sipped what looked to be water infused with some kind of green potion. “It be breaking and reforming. Before that, Izzy be working for Rhysling family. That family be ceasing to exist, and you be coming into existence, and Izzy be finding you.”

Albus found himself staring at Gellert across the table. For once, the smug expression had disappeared from his lover’s face. Albus swallowed and said, as calmly as he could, “Time has already broken and reformed?”

“It be breaking and reforming when a time traveler come back,” Izzy said, and enjoyed her water. “Not that it be all his fault. There be other forces at work that he not be knowing about. But before this, you were being Professor at Hogwarts, Mr. Albus, and Mr. Gellert be languishing in prison.” She frowned at Gellert. “_Languishing_,” she repeated, as if she thought they might not have understood her. “Izzy be liking this reality better.”

Albus closed his eyes, overwhelmed. Of course he had thought of staying at Hogwarts and teaching Transfiguration. He’d enjoyed that for a few years. But he’d seen that he was hiding, in a way. Avoiding politics and telling everyone that he was just a professor when he had the power to do something about it. Pretending he couldn’t do anything was as evil, in his eyes, as committing the crimes.

“What prison was I in?” Gellert whispered. “Azkaban?”

“No.” Izzy gave him what looked like a slightly pitying look, except there was so much exasperation mixed with it. “Nurmengard. You be not making a good decision when you build that prison, Mr. Gellert. You be making _stupid _decision.”

Albus controlled the impulse to laugh, especially since Gellert looked close to mortally offended. He cleared his throat. “If what you’re saying is true, Izzy, then we can’t follow the Ministry’s directives when dealing with time travelers after all.”

Gellert shot him a stare, but Izzy only shook her head, and made the turquoise earrings Albus hadn’t consciously realized she was wearing clash. “Izzy not be knowing what that directive is. Izzy be dealing with _civilized _wizards.”

“Right. It says that any time traveler is to be captured, neutralized, made to reverse their actions if possible, and then killed.”

Izzy drew herself up, and her ears quivered and stood straight out. “Izzy be knowing that Ministry wizards not be civilized,” she said, and then took a deep breath that seemed to use most of the air in the room. “She not be realizing that they be _stupid _also.”

“Doesn’t it matter that I’m the Minister for Magic?” Albus asked, intrigued despite himself with what she would make of that.

She cast him a deeply disgruntled look. “You be living in a house with Izzy. There be hope for you.”

Albus laughed despite himself, and then stopped as Gellert’s hand clamped down on his. Gellert was breathing hard enough to remind Albus of the dragon he had once wanted to turn into.

“You’re saying that we _should _return to the timeline where I’m imprisoned and you’re a useless professor at Hogwarts, Albus? I suppose that I know what our bond really means to you, then.”

Albus sighed. “I didn’t say that. I said that we _shouldn’t _do that, in fact. But it is what the Ministry protocols mandate when dealing with a time traveler. You helped me come up with some of those laws, Gellert.”

“I didn’t know that…I didn’t know time travelers had that sort of power.”

“You suspected it, or why did we outlaw the use of time travel magic and any research into it?”

Gellert took in a deep breath that he held. Then he met Albus’s eyes and released it all at once. “I always anticipated that they would seek to destroy the reality we lived in,” he murmured, leaning for a moment against Albus. “I never knew that they might have _created _it. Do you truly want to destroy the reality we have now because it’s not the original one?”

Albus touched Gellert’s hair, and shook his head. “No. Although we might still need to find this time traveler. What if he does it again, and shatters the timeline further, or sends us back to what we were before? What if this was an accident, and he’s _seeking _to restore the status quo?”

Gellert shuddered and leaned back to stare at him. “That would be the worst of all possible worlds.”

Albus nodded. “And we have this possible world, and I’m rather enamored of it.” He basked in the smile he received. “So. We need to find him, and convince him to cease and desist.” He turned to face Izzy. “Can you find him?”

“Izzy be sensing the trail of what he did, but not the exact position he be taking now,” Izzy admitted with something that Albus thought was her own version of mortal offense. Then again, a house-elf didn’t like to have her competency doubted. “She can point you in one direction, though.”

“Please do so, Izzy.”

“He be trying to make up for some of what he done. He be worried about the children. If Mr. Albus be looking at people who hired new teachers or tutors recently…” Izzy let the words trail off suggestively.

“That is a good direction,” Albus said, and he felt a small surge of hope. Who knew? If this man was worried about the children he had harmed, then he might not be as evil or self-centered as time travelers often were. “Do you think he’s been hired at Hogwarts?”

Izzy shrugged. “It could be, Mr. Albus. The trail be running out in the middle of Diagon Alley.” She finished her water with a deep gesture and then waved her hand at the dishes, making them fly into the kitchen. A second later, she disappeared with a sharp pop, marking the end of the conversation.

“Why do you want to find him, then, if you think that this is the best of all possible worlds?” Gellert asked softly, letting his hand rest on Albus’s shoulder.

“Because he might think that he needs to repair _this_, if he regrets what he did.”

Gellert thought about it for a moment, then nodded with a small sigh. “You, of course, aren’t hoping to control him. You’re hoping to speak with him and convince him.”

“Yes. And I’ll tolerate no _private _conversations with him once we find him, Gellert.”

Gellert laughed softly, shaking his head. “You can’t still think that I hold to the same beliefs that I did when you fought me in the war? Especially now that even in a different timeline, I know I would have lost.”

Albus watched him steadily. What he didn’t want to say aloud was that he feared, in some part of himself that was always vigilant, that Gellert might want to change the timeline into a world where he had succeeded.

*

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

Mariana turned away from the nursery where Severus was asleep in a regular bed, having outgrown the cot a while ago now, and nodded to Seneca. She would have been cringing in fear most of the time, but honestly, she was ready to defend herself. “Good evening, Seneca. Find out what?”

“That you have been taking the boy out of the house. For what reasons, I don’t know yet.” Seneca was smiling, his hands gripping his wand and the doorframe. He leaned towards her as if he meant to loom, although he had never been so much taller than she that that was a possibility. “You are a traitor, _Mariana._”

Although it would make no difference in the end, Mariana gave in to one temptation. She laughed, and watched the lines of her husband’s face alter into shock. She shook her head a little. “I followed your lead when it came to Eileen, and what happened? She ran away from home because she couldn’t stand _you_. What did you think would happen with someone you mistreated so badly, Seneca? Let alone a delicate child, a high-strung one who wanted your attention so badly? You treated her exactly as you wished, and we lost her. Of course I wasn’t going to follow your lead when it came to Severus.”

“You are—” Seneca seemed at a loss for words. “You cannot be such a _child, _Mariana.”

“No. I am standing up for children.” Mariana still felt a tremor of fear as her husband leaned towards her with his wand visibly lifted, but the time spent with Harry and watching the way he answered uncomfortable questions and faced his fears for Severus had given her the courage to do this. “And you are the one who has mistaken your own desires for objective reality. I won’t let you ruin Severus the way you ruined Eileen.”

Seneca shook his head slowly, not absorbing the words, Mariana knew. There had never been a hope of _that_. “Mariana…what exactly did you hope to achieve by telling me this? You know that I am more powerful and faster and crueler than you are. And you are going to _suffer _for this.”

His emphasis on the word still made the sharp fluttering in her chest worse, but Mariana had one weapon she had never told him about, and wouldn’t have to now. As Seneca moved closer, she whispered, “_Tempus._”

Seneca laughed. “A Time—”

And then he flung his hands up in front of his face, and _screamed._

Mariana knew exactly what he was seeing, since she had been exposed to it often as a child until she learned it. It was the second wandless gift of the Peverell bloodline, besides finding time travelers: to see into the whirlwind of time and the crossing universes, a beautiful picture once one got used to it, but disorienting chaos until then.

Seneca would be seeing thousands of versions of himself at the moment, and he would see them suffering and dying as well as succeeding. His mind wouldn’t be able to process it.

But he was right that he was crueler than she. Mariana had done it only to buy time, not to really hurt him. As he flailed and screamed, Mariana stepped up to him, aimed her wand, and waited for his panicked eyes to meet hers.

“_Obliviate,_” she whispered, gently.

*

“And you are sure that divorcing your wife is the best choice you can make for the Family?”

Orion lifted his chin. The capital letter when his father spoke of the Family had never been more audible. He nodded. “Yes, Father. Walburga embarrassed the Blacks in a public place. She cast an _Unforgivable. _She could have hit Sirius or Regulus. She would have ended an alliance relationship with the Potter family that I’ve been working on for years. Or she might have been arrested by the Aurors, and we would have had to spend political power and money on getting her out of prison that she wouldn’t even repent having cost us. It’s time.”

Arcturus turned so that he was watching Walburga. His father had been confined to a chair for the past two years, ever since one of the Black family’s ancient enemies had managed to ambush him and hit his legs with a Pulsating Bone Curse that meant the bones would only shatter when regrown. But that didn’t affect the power of the dark stare that he was leveling Walburga with. “Why did you do this, Walburga?”

“I hate him.”

“Orion?”

“Who else do you think I mean, you senile old man?” Walburga leaned forwards out of the chair Orion had placed her in, a massive black one nearly as big as Arcturus’s, with a low back. “Of course I mean Orion! I expected a husband who would do what I wanted, that’s what Father promised me, and instead I got _this _bastard!”

Orion drew in his breath, but hid his gladness. Well. That had settled the matter in his favor without a further word.

“Pollux promised you that, did he?” Arcturus smiled, just a little, but it was enough for Walburga’s eyes to widen and for her to shrink back in the chair, as if she had suddenly remembered the kind of man Arcturus was. “I am _more _than glad, dear daughter-in-law, to tell you that I have granted Orion’s petition. And then you can go and find yourself a husband more to your liking.”

“You—you can’t forbid me from using the name Black!” Walburga yelped, straining against the ropes as Arcturus drew his wand. “That’s the name I was born with!”

“Oh, of course,” Arcturus drawled in a silken voice that brought back a moment of Orion’s childhood, hearing his father speaking like that the morning before one of their enemies “committed suicide.” “But I can take away all access to the vaults belonging to my branch of the family. Your access to your sons. Your access to Orion’s bed and house. And your marriage tie.” He gestured sharply with his wand.

Orion gasped as he felt the marriage between them dissolving. The wedding vows unbound themselves from his magic, and his body felt cleansed and hit and deepened. He sagged a little, but managed to stand upright as Walburga began to wail.

“Tell your father that he should find you something to do,” Arcturus said, as he undid the ropes Orion had used. Walburga staggered to her feet, looking murderous enough to attack, but Orion knew she wouldn’t. The dissolving of the marriage, as the party who had committed the wrong, would weaken her for at least a month. “Something that will not make you cross paths with the _senior _branch of the Black family again. I should never have permitted this marriage. I can only hope that your weakness has not affected Orion’s sons.”

Walburga walked over to the Floo and departed without a word, which surprised Orion a little. He supposed she had finally learned what the limits were.

He turned back to his father, to find Arcturus studying him with a narrow, skeptical eye. “And how are you planning to reward the man our family has a debt to?” he asked.

Orion straightened his shoulders. “I used the Potential-Sensing Spell on him, Father. If he had attended Hogwarts, he would have been a long-standing ally of the Blacks by now. Or married into the clan.”

Arcturus stared at him. “A half-blood. You think one of us would have willingly married a half-blood?”

Orion stared back steadily. “We do it often, Father.” He hesitated, then added, “I know the truth about Mother’s blood status.”

For a long moment, the air around him literally crackled with ice, the manifestation of his father’s anger. Then Arcturus grunted and looked away, drawing his hand in front of his eyes.

“It is true that she was not the daughter of her mother’s husband,” he said quietly. “Well. And you were clever enough to figure it out.” He glanced back at Orion, and _there _was the approval Orion had craved and dared to reveal his knowledge for. He continued to stand steady, and Arcturus nodded.

“Then draw this Evanson in however you can, so that we will have to pay less,” he commanded. “And see if you can figure out the pure-blood side of his family, so that we might draw them in as well, or else perhaps put them in our debt for not revealing the existence of an illegitimate child.”

“Father.” Orion bobbed his head and stalked out of his room, more than pleased with how the afternoon had gone.

_Will Evanson be?_

Orion shrugged a little, smiling to himself. That was for him to know and Evanson to rage futilely against.


	9. Suffer Little Children

“Welcome to Grimmauld Place.”

Harry felt Severus’s hand tighten in his. He looked down and smiled gently at the boy. It had been a fight to get Mariana to agree to let him bring Severus here, but when he had mentioned the extensive wards around the Black property, she’d agreed that if anyone could keep Seneca out, it would be the Blacks.

“This is young Prince that you mentioned,” said Black, lounging against the wall near the door as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Harry wondered if he could somehow get away with mentioning that having house-elf heads hanging on the wall wasn’t the height of fashion.

“Yes,” Severus said, tearing his attention away from the heads. “I’m Severus Prince.” He bobbed a little and held out his hand.

Black smiled in a condescending pure-blood way as he shook Severus’s hand. “And what a polite young gentleman. I can hope that my own sons will learn some of the same courtesy from your tutor.”

“This is only a preliminary visit,” Harry pointed as he and Severus walked down the corridor and Black closed the door. “I haven’t agreed to tutor them.”

“My sons are charming.”

_A statement isn’t the same as an argument, _Harry thought, but he kept his peace. That was a lesson he had taken to stating to Severus, who was as determined to learn argument as he as everything else, but he didn’t think either Sirius or Regulus would be old enough yet to understand.

“This is our house-elf, Kreacher,” Black continued in a light tone as he led the way down into the kitchen Harry remembered so well from Order meetings. The place was brightly-lit and clean now, although the light appeared to come from the walls themselves instead of windows. “He serves as Sirius and Regulus’s caretaker when I’m called away. More often now that my wife and I are divorced, of course.”

Harry wrenched his eyes away from Kreacher, who was staring at him. “I had no idea divorce was that fast.”

“When you’re a pure-blood with some power, it is.” Black was staring at Harry, too, as if expecting some reaction to that statement. Harry shrugged with one shoulder. He wasn’t going to play up to blood purists for anyone, and he _certainly_ wouldn’t include that in his lessons with Severus, Sirius, or Regulus.

_And it’s not even a given yet that you’ll tutor them._

Meanwhile, Kreacher had kept on staring. Then he turned to Black and held out his hands in mute appeal. “Master is going to be letting the one who hurt our family sit here and eat?” he demanded in a hoarse voice.

Harry tensed, and the Elder Wand hummed in its holster along his arm. Severus stared at him. Harry gave him a smile as reassuring as he could, while he watched Black glance back and forth between him and Kreacher.

“He has already told me that he hurt our family, although so far he has refused to clarify the exact nature of that harm,” Black murmured at last. His hand made a short curling motion that seemed to indicate he was thinking about stepping forwards and reaching out. Harry added coldness to his look, and Black moved away with his hands in the air. “I made the decision to allow him here anyway. Please bring the breakfast and then go and fetch Sirius and Regulus, Kreacher.”

“Kreacher be doing as Master Black asks,” Kreacher said, and bowed to Black while glaring at Harry as daringly as a house-elf could. Then he turned and popped away.

“How curious that a house-elf can sense something like that,” Black said softly. “And I would hardly call Kreacher the most observation or best-educated of the breed.”

Harry bustled Severus into the chair next to his, ignoring the way Black sat right next to him. If Kreacher wasn’t going to talk about the time travel and destroy the facade Harry was trying so hard to build, Harry hardly would.

Eggs, bacon, toast, porridge, several different varieties of marmalade, more of dried fruit, thick pots of cream, steaming scones, butter, and so many glasses of juice appeared at the table that Harry blinked. Black gave him a complacent smile and reached for the toast and, surprisingly, a glass of pumpkin juice. “Kreacher does like to impress when we have guests.”

“Even ones he despises?”

“Perhaps especially those. Do eat your fill, Evanson. You often look as though you don’t.”

Harry glared at Black for a second, then turned away to Severus, who was tugging at his sleeve. He banished the fleeting thought that it was unfair he was in a whole different timeline and yet got scolded for being thin anyway. “Yes, Severus? What is it?”

“There’s too many,” Severus whispered in a loud tone. “I don’t know what to choose.”

Harry could feel Black’s amusement without turning his head, but he kept his concentration on Severus. “That’s fine. You can choose whatever you like, and I’ll tell you what it is if you don’t know.”

Severus shot a cautious look around Harry at Black, then nodded and chose a jar of orange marmalade and a scone. Harry stifled a pang that Severus’s grandfather wouldn’t let him have even these normal things, and began preparing a scone for Severus along with a glass of milk.

“Ah, Evanson. My sons, Sirius and Regulus.”

Harry looked up with a smile that he couldn’t help. He hoped Black would just attribute it to the fact that he loved children. Sirius was yawning and pushing a mop of wild dark hair out of his face. Regulus was toddling along behind him with the steps of someone who had barely learned to walk, his eyes wide as he looked at Harry.

“I look forward to teaching them,” Harry said, and then caught Black’s smile and added hastily, “If we all decide the arrangement would suit us, of course. Your sons should have a choice.”

“I don’t want the teaching,” Sirius declared, and dropped into his chair to glare at Harry. “The tutors hurt.”

Black’s eyes turned furious in a way that Harry could, for once, empathize with. He wanted to murder Sirius’s tutors himself. He faced Sirius and said softly, “I can promise you I will never hurt you.”

Sirius stared at him and then shut his mouth again. It seemed he didn’t know what to say. Harry could hardly blame him for that. He ruffled Sirius’s hair anyway and smiled at him, then turned to Regulus. “What do you like to eat?”

Regulus curled up and buried his head in his brother’s shoulder. But Sirius managed to whisper, “Toast and eggs.” Then he added, “But Reggie gets porridge cause he’s a baby.”

Harry smiled, and reached for both.

*

Watching Evanson interact with the children was fascinating.

He forgot himself when he spoke to Prince, Orion thought. He was acting as though he was trying to keep from drawing attention to the boy, but when he did speak to him—which he did often, alternating back and forth between him and Sirius—it was with adult vocabulary. Although Prince usually nodded instead of replying, shooting wary looks at Orion all the while, it was obvious he understood.

A mystery there, one Orion intended to solve.

But the man was good with both Sirius and Regulus. The minute Sirius had muttered about tutors hurting—something Orion had _not _known and never would have tolerated if he had—Evanson had become a protector. Orion had no doubt he was seeing to the bottom of the man’s essential nature. That was what he was.

And it explained his remorse at whatever harm he had inflicted on the Black family, Orion thought. The man would go to great lengths to avoid harming children, and probably saw himself as someone who defended instead of attacked.

Evanson caught Orion looking, and scowled at him. Orion smiled amiably back and reached for a piece of bacon.

Evanson blinked in what looked like shock. Orion shrugged. The man would learn, one way or another, that Orion was human and could be good for him.

“Would you recommend tutoring for my boys so young?” Orion asked. “Perhaps I was being rather hasty in thinking they should have it.”

Evanson tapped his foot on the floor as he thought. He was the most expressive person Orion had ever met, and it was hard to keep his eyes off him. Of course, he let his face show his thoughts, and Evanson scowled at him in return.

“Not ordinary lessons, I suppose,” Evanson murmured. “But ones that will ease their fears. And ones that can focus their magic.”

Orion frowned. “You mean something specific by that, I think, but I don’t know what.”

“Accidental magic isn’t as accidental as a lot of people think. It happens when the child is afraid or stressed,” Evanson murmured, eyes resting heavily on Orion’s sons as if he thought they would have reason to be stressed. Well, perhaps they did, Orion admitted, if only to himself. “They can focus it to defend themselves, with practice.”

“I have never heard of such a thing.”

“Insulted that such wisdom might reside in the son of a Muggleborn, Black?”

“No,” Orion said, honestly. “Surprised because it sounds so useful, and I would have expected my family to discover it and make use of it before now.” He leaned forwards, careful not to touch Evanson or look as if he was shielding his sons from the man, maintaining an earnest expression. “It’s a good reminder for me of how much an ally can add to our strength.”

Evanson eyed him as if he thought Orion was lying—although why would he?—and then he nodded and focused again on Sirius and Regulus. “Would you like to learn to focus your magic?” he asked.

Regulus looked up with bright, curious eyes, but didn’t speak. Orion knew he understood far more than it seemed, but he was still lagging far behind where his brother had been at the same age, when Sirius was speaking full sentences. Orion was trying his best not to let it worry him.

“I want to learn magic,” Sirius said, latching on to the one thing he probably understood out of the words Evanson was spouting.

Evanson gave him such an affectionate smile that Orion’s breath caught. He almost wondered if Evanson was an ally that his family had tried to recruit before, but under another name and appearance.

It seemed that he wasn’t the only one to notice Evanson’s attention. Prince tugged on Evanson’s hand and said authoritatively, “You have to cut up my toast for me. Grandmother said.”

“You don’t _need _it done that way,” Evanson teased, but he began to cut it up.

“I want it done that way,” Prince said, and leaned around Evanson to give Orion the definition of a skeptical glance. Orion wouldn’t have expected a child so young to understand that much nuance in the situation. On the other hand, the Princes had been famed for the kind of magic they would use on young children. It was entirely possible that that had happened with Prince after he was rescued from the Muggles. Orion resolved to keep an eye on the situation.

“Sooner or later, Severus, you’ll have to realize that we can’t all get what we want,” Evanson murmured, even as he placed the neatly-sliced toast back on the plate.

“Adults want things all the time,” Prince protested as he began to eat in a finicky way that made Orion’s lips twitch despite himself. “That man behind you wants you to come back and he wants you to stay here. Why?”

Orion narrowed his eyes. Yes, the boy _was _too smart for someone his age.

He realized a second later that he shouldn’t have used such an approximation of a threatening glare against Prince, as Evanson immediately moved forwards and in between them. “Do that one more time and we’re going to leave,” he said under his breath to Orion, his eyes blazing. “I want to help your sons, but my commitment is to Severus first.”

Orion wished he knew why, but he sensed that it was too early to ask, and Evanson was so protective of the boy he might even leave because of the question. Orion resorted, instead, to a tactic that he had already noticed flustered Evanson. “And I can’t persuade you to think of me at all?”

Evanson blinked. “What?”

“You can’t see your way clear to helping _me_? At all?”

“You got your divorce, it was all over the papers. And you want me as a tutor for your sons, not anything else. I’m a half-blood. What do I have to offer you personally?”

Orion knew many people who would have spoken that way with a kind of false modesty, wanting to be complimented and drawn out and reassured that of _course _they were priceless. But Evanson asked the question between bewilderment and curiosity, and Orion knew he meant it.

Orion leaned forwards, certain that he was holding Evanson’s eyes, and answered as simply as he knew how. “A friendship with someone powerful.”

“I’m sure that you have enough of those, too. What with being a Black and everything.”

“Power, but not _friendship_,” Orion said, and wondered wearily when Evanson would start to actually listen to him. “That is the difference. That is what I want, and what I hope you will eventually consent to provide me.”

Evanson stood there, studying him, even though he also moved automatically to give Prince the bowl of porridge with brown sugar that he asked for. His eyes were narrow and shrewd, and Orion found that he didn’t like the look in them much.

“I can’t say whether I will or not,” Evanson said abruptly. “But at least you admitted it. I was beginning to think that we would sit here through this whole pseudo-polite breakfast and you wouldn’t say anything.”

“What’s pseudo mean?” Sirius piped up. Regulus had decided to eat, but he was mostly playing with his food, because he was spending so much time looking at Evanson. Orion sighed and moved around the table to cast a few charms on Regulus’s hands. Most of the time, he gave his youngest son what were essentially invisible gloves to eat breakfast, but he’d forgotten in his battle of words with Evanson.

“It means not really,” said Evanson, smiling at Sirius. Orion ignored the tightness in his chest as he saw the way Evanson smiled. Someday, he would have that genuine friendship, and becoming jealous of his son when said son was a child was unbecoming.

“You’re not really polite?” Sirius sounded confused now, nibbling the edge of a scone as he watched Evanson.

“Oh, no. I’m rude a lot of the time.” Evanson’s mouth curved up, and he glanced down at Prince. “Severus can tell you about that.”

“Mr. Evanson is rude a lot,” Prince said, as if he had been waiting for years to tell someone that. He set down his spoon on the edge of his plate, and nodded. “Grandmother says that he’s the rudest man she’s ever met.”

Evanson laughed. Orion supposed he thought differently about insults from children than from men and women. “Yes, she says that. But the times that she says it, it’s because I just proved something wrong that she thought she knew.” He shrugged. “She shouldn’t make sweeping statements when she doesn’t know if they’re true.”

“Is that what you think of me?” Orion finally asked, unable to help himself. “That I make sweeping statements that aren’t true?”

“Oh, no,” Evanson said, and gave him one moment of balance before he grinned wickedly. “The particular statements you make aren’t true, either.”

“A-_tick¬_-ular,” Regulus said, charmed by the sound of a word the way he sometimes was. From the soft smile Evanson gave him, he was as bewitched as most members of Orion’s family were.

“That’s right,” Evanson said, and the look he flung at Orion couldn’t be called anything but challenging, even as he suspected that Evanson might be softening it for the sake of his children. “Your father is many things, but subtle and polite aren’t any of them.”

“You wrong me,” Orion said, and made sure to keep his face polite and his voice mild. “I am telling the truth when I say that I enjoy your company.”

Evanson snorted, and turned back to Prince. Orion resigned himself to watching, and to sometimes answering questions about his sons. Honestly, this would take longer than he’d thought.

*

“Why was he so strange and rude? Why did you want to go over to the house if Mr. Black is so rude?”

“For Mr. Black’s children,” Harry said, and ruffled Severus’s hair. Severus was still leaning against him after they had Apparated back to Laocoon’s shop, and showed no inclination to move away yet. “Children can’t help who their parents are, but I might be able to help them.”

“But I come first.” Severus stared up at him with searching dark eyes.

Harry knelt to embrace him. “You do.” He caught a glimpse of the lightning bolt scar on Severus’s forehead as his hair moved, but he forced himself to ignore that and just smile at Severus. “You always will.”

Severus relaxed enough to stick his thumb in his mouth, and Harry kept holding him, while he stared at the wall and replayed the breakfast at Grimmauld Place in his head. He ended up thinking the same things he had at the time: Sirius was cute, Regulus was adorable, he wanted to be around them, and Orion Black was an arse.

Ah, well. It was a small price to pay to be Sirius and Regulus’s tutor.


	10. A Real Education

“And you’re sure that your new duties won’t interfere with Severus’s education?” Mariana watched Harry closely as he showed Severus how to sprinkle chopped bay leaves into the cauldron so that the Somnium Draught, a mild version of the Dreamless Sleep potion, would come out perfectly.

“I’m sure, Mrs. Prince.” Although Mariana had granted Harry permission to call her by her first name, and certainly called him by his, he had been more formal lately. Maybe it was Black’s influence. Harry shook his head, moving his longer fringe out of his eyes, and smiled at her. “Severus always comes first.”

“I have to come first,” Severus said. “I was here first.” He paused and looked closer. “Why is the surface shimmering like that?”

Mariana felt her eyes widen, but before she could say something, Harry curled his arm around Severus’s waist and tugged him off the stool he was standing on to reach the table where the cauldron sat. Mariana herself stepped nimbly out of the way as they watched the cauldron settle back into place with a rattle.

“That was less explosive than—”

A silent column of purple potion rose out of the cauldron. Harry’s wand flicked, containing it so that it fell _as _a column back into the cauldron, rather than splattering all over everything. Harry sighed and shook his head. “Maybe I should leave his training in brewing to you, Mrs. Prince. I’m not as good at it as you are.”

“Why did it shimmer like that?” Severus demanded, wriggling in Harry’s grip. He turned around and gave him a stern look.

“We did something wrong.”

“Yes, but what?”

Harry gave Mariana a helpless glance, and she smiled a little and took over the explanation. “You must not have added enough powdered lapis lazuli, Severus. That would mean the potion was unstable when the bay leaves were added, and it wouldn’t take very much of them to cause an explosion.”

“What makes the lapis lazuli react badly with the bay leaves?”

Mariana settled down in the nearest chair to explain the concept, while Harry silently cleaned up the cauldron. Mariana kept an eye on him. She didn’t care for the dark look his face wore when he was silent, and she also knew that, although he wasn’t as skilled at brewing as most Princes were, the mistake he had made today wasn’t one common to him. He had reacted quickly enough to spare Severus any harm, of course, but…

Something was wrong.

*

“Mr. Evanson, thank you for agreeing to come.”

Harry gave a short nod to Orion Black and looked around the playroom that he’d been ushered into, after being guided from the door by a shivering, terrified house-elf. There were small bookshelves around the walls, and the ceiling had been done in a constantly shifting constellation of stars that would show several different parts of the night sky. There were rolls of parchment, quills, and what looked like soft plush numbers on several small tables, accompanied by chairs of the right size for children.

“I don’t know much about teaching children their letters and numbers,” Harry thought he had to mention. “I thought I was going to be teaching Sirius and Regulus about magic.”

Black stepped up behind him, and Harry fought to keep his back from stiffening. “Of course,” Black said softly, and for a second, his fingers trailed down Harry’s shoulder. “These are here so that I can pick up on lessons with my sons when you’ve finished.”

Harry twisted around to gape at Black. “_You’re _going to teach them?”

“Did you not think I could?”

“Well, no, or you wouldn’t have left them to tutors in the first place.”

For a moment, Black stared at him. Then he said, “I trusted my wife to find the tutors, and I trusted her to take care of them. Will you blame me for trusting her?”

Harry only shrugged, not wanting to say what he thought in front of Sirius and Regulus, who were walking into the room. Regulus immediately went and sat down in one of the little chairs, but Sirius flopped down on his belly in front of his and watched Harry. Harry snorted. He recognized a test of his authority when he saw one, even if Sirius wasn’t as annoying as Zacharias Smith had been when he questioned Harry in front of the DA in fifth year.

“You can lie on the floor if you want,” he told Sirius. “But then you won’t be able to move the practice wand I brought you all that well.” Laocoon had started selling practice wands that were capable of channeling innate magic in some pale imitations of spells last year, and he hadn’t objected at all to Harry bringing them along. In fact, he was probably making plans right now to tell everyone who came into the shop about the Blacks patronizing it.

“You do blame me,” Black said behind him, even as Sirius popped up and declared, “_Wands_?”

“Wands,” Harry agreed, and pulled the practice sticks out of the plain black satchel he was carrying over his shoulder. They were both made of rowan, a precaution that Laocoon had taken on his own but Harry thought sensible. That wood would make it harder for his little students to accidentally hurt each other or cast Dark spells.

“I insist on speaking to you, Mr. Evanson.”

Harry didn’t miss the wary way Sirius looked at his father, or Regulus cowered back as if to hide his face. Harry turned around and gave his own look in Black’s direction. “Pardon me, Mr. Black,” he said, enunciating every word the way he imagined a snotty pure-blood would, in case that made it more comprehensible for Black. “But you’re interrupting the lesson.”

Black stood as still as if he was going to strike. Harry watched him. He hadn’t thought the man would attack him in front of his sons, but then, Black had already proven more bigoted and bullheaded than Harry had thought.

A second later, he turned and stormed out of the room. Harry rolled his eyes, but made sure he was done with the gesture before he turned back to Sirius and Regulus. “There, he’ll have some things to think about,” he said cheerfully. “Would you like to learn how to practice magic?”

“We’re little,” Sirius whispered. He was staring around as though he thought his father was going to pop out from behind a chair.

“I know,” Harry said. “Which is why you can just watch me for right now.” He laid the practice wands down on the little table and grinned at Sirius. “Are you going to get up so you can use the wand, or just lie on your stomach all day?”

“I could do _some _from here,” Sirius protested, but he did get up and walk over to sit on the little chair next to Regulus’s, his eyes bright with something Harry at least hoped was curiosity.

“Sure, you could,” Harry said, and got a wondering smile from Sirius. His heart ached as he thought of the man who had been his godfather in his own world, but, well, that was gone now, and through his own actions. The least he could do was try to make sure that this Sirius and Regulus had better futures than the past he had given them. “Look what happens when I move my wand like this.”

The Elder Wand hummed in his hand as if objecting to being used as a demonstration for children. Harry ignored that. It had replaced his holly wand, which meant it was going to have to put up with things it didn’t like.

He swept it slowly through the air in front of him, making the motion big and obvious. Sparks trailed him and danced down to rest on the carpet in front of Sirius and Regulus. Sirius’s eyes went big. Regulus let out a yell and then clasped his hand over his mouth.

“You okay?” Harry asked gently, crouching down in front of them and keeping the Elder Wand out of the way.

“Fire,” Regulus whispered, but his eyebrows went up and his brow furrowed when he realized that the sparks didn’t seem to have caught. He glanced sideways at Harry.

“There are spells in here that will prevent anything bad from happening with your magic,” Harry said reassuringly. And that was true; he’d felt the spells the moment he’d stepped into the nursery, far more part of the walls and floor than the shelves or any of the other furniture. “I’ll go slow and show you lots of simple magic, though, okay?”

Regulus nodded even though Harry wasn’t sure how much he’d understood. He stood back up, and Sirius waved his hand around wildly.

Harry smiled. He decided that one of the tutors had probably enforced the same rules about raising hands that Hogwarts professors would have. “What’s on your mind, Sirius?”

“We can’t do magic because we’re _little_,” Sirius said with authority.

“I think you’ll find that you can,” Harry murmured. He had chosen this particular lesson because it didn’t involve an actual spell, but hopefully it would still sneak past the ideas the boys might have had put into their heads about how they couldn’t do any magic at this young an age and show them their power. “It’s not the same as the spells your Dad does, right?”

Sirius slowly shook his head. “Or our Mum,” he whispered, then flinched.

Regulus tensed up in his chair. Harry reacted without thinking through whether it was the right thing, just scooping Regulus out of the chair and putting him on his hip. Sirius stared with his mouth open.

“That’s like our Dad!”

“Yes,” Harry said. “I promise, I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to _help _you. Do you want me to show you the thing with the wand again?” He looked back and forth between Sirius and Regulus for a second, then reckoned he wouldn’t get an answer until he put Regulus down. He plopped him back in the chair and ruffled Regulus’s hair with his fingers.

Regulus blinked at him, so adorable that Harry had to grin. He turned to Sirius.

Sirius seemed to realize he had to be the decision-maker, if Regulus even understood what was going on. Black had said that Regulus didn’t speak much but did understand. Sirius took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “Show us the thing with the wand again.”

Harry grinned in delight and stood. He was more than happy that the boys were getting past whatever barriers their mother and their tutors had put in their way. He didn’t need to be addressed formally, even if it was cute when Severus did it. He just needed to be able to teach them.

“Watch, then,” he said, and trailed the wand slowly through the air again. He wondered if it was his imagination that the Elder Wand didn’t thrum in indignation this time, or not.

*

Albus sighed and raised his head slowly from the crystal bowl of pure water he had gathered. Gellert was waiting for him with a cloth to wipe his face and an impatient expression. Albus shook his head.

“I don’t understand how one man is able to hide from us this easily,” Gellert said, in the kind of low voice that might sound charming from a distance but that Albus knew could break into shouting all too easily.

Albus dried his face and said nothing. Neither of them had that much talent in scrying, or this would have been much easier. And Izzy hadn’t given them more clues, even a length of time that history had changed in, which would have made it easier to narrow the hunt.

“There’s no one obviously out of place,” Albus said at last, when Gellert had taken the chair closest to the fire and been staring moodily into the fireplace for several minutes. “Of course, enough time has passed by now that he could have been able to adapt to the world around us.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Albus.”

“He’s an oddly modest time traveler. He hasn’t tried to claim a prominent place.”

“How do we know that, though?” Gellert tossed his head back, crushing a wave of pale curls against the back of the chair. “The timeline has changed enough to make us think that someone who is new might always have been here.”

Albus paused and then sighed. “You’re right, of course. It’s so hard to understand what happened, what changed, and what we should do when we catch up with him.”

“Shake his hand. You would have put me in _prison, _Albus.”

“Well, I doubt that you surrendered in the other timeline the way you did in this one.”

Gellert turned his head and frowned. “If you were a professor at Hogwarts, why do you think you would have been involved in the decisions to make me surrender and put me in prison at all? That’s a rather odd detail in Izzy’s story.”

Albus sat down in the chair beside him and closed his eyes. “Does that mean that you don’t believe it?”

“No,” Gellert said after a long, silent moment that ground on Albus’s nerves like the gears of a clock pressing against each other. “No, I know that it’s real.” He sighed and shook his head. “It’s ridiculous, but I believe it. And it doesn’t get us any closer to tracking our time traveler to disbelieve it.”

Izzy appeared with a crack in front of them before Albus could say anything. She stared at the crystal bowl with water in it and then turned and stared at them. “Mr. Albus and Mr. Gellert is being civilized and cleaning up,” she said.

Albus blinked for a minute, wondering what she meant, and then realized that he had dripped water down the side of the chair. He nodded. “We will, Izzy, I promise. I’m just a bit exhausted from the scrying and need to rest for a moment.”

Izzy rolled her eyes and snapped her fingers. The bowl and the water vanished, and two mugs of hot tea, from the scent, appeared in front of her. “Izzy can be helping Mr. Albus and Mr. Gellert this _once_,” she said. She paused as she watched them pick up the mugs and then twitched her ears. “Or maybe twice.”

“You can do something to help us find this time traveler?” Albus asked, trying not to be too hopeful. It _sounded_ like that might be what she meant, but he didn’t actually know.

“Izzy is helping in her own way.” Izzy folded her arms and studied them. “And only because both of you be messing up if you be trying it.” She held out her hands, and something formed in the air above her palms, so bright that Albus shielded his eyes with the side of his mug.

“No,” Gellert breathed.

“No, what?” Albus shot him a curious glance, even as he felt the Elder Wand thrum in its holster at his side. It had been acting strangely lately, sometimes feeling inert and sometimes bursting with power, but he didn’t remember it reacting like this.

“I—I searched for one of those, for years. It would have been the ultimate weapon against a large army. And I could have just turned to a house-elf and asked for one?”

“Most house-elves not be giving you something like this, Mr. Gellert. I only be doing it because others agree.”

Albus finally managed to see what was going on, although the center of the silver thing hovering over Izzy was still too brilliant to look at. It resembled a four-pointed metal star, with a spark like a diamond embedded in each point. Albus shook his head. “I have to admit that I don’t know what I’m looking at, even though I should if you wanted it for the war, Gellert.”

“It’s…” Gellert cleared his throat. “It’s a weapon called the Expiscor.”

“It finds something?” Albus asked. His Latin was a bit rusty.

“It finds _someone_,” Gellert corrected, his voice hushed. He had leaned forwards as if to take the Expiscor from Izzy, but she shifted and stared at him, and he ended up sitting back in his chair. “The most dangerous and powerful enemy you have. It kills them. It can fly and slice through…” He trailed off, this time because Albus was fairly sure his expression mirrored Izzy’s. “Well. Yes. It kills that person, and then it locks onto the _next _most powerful and dangerous enemy you have, and kills them. It can’t be hurt. It can’t be broken. It can be blocked, but it takes a lot of power, and probably the only person who could summon that kind of shield is the Expiscor’s first target.”

“And it won’t hurt the time traveler that we’re looking for?” Albus asked. He might not have decided if he owed this time traveler a debt or not, but he certainly wanted him alive.

“This be the original design,” Izzy said, an undertone of grave sadness in her voice. “Not the twisted weapon humans be making.” She drew her hands back, and the Expiscor kept on hovering. “It find only. It be drawn to power.”

“Can we be sure that it’s going to find the time traveler and not Albus, then?” Gellert’s voice was a bit more subdued than usual, but only a little. Albus refrained from rolling his eyes, then decided he might as well.

Izzy gave them both a strange look, but it was a long moment before she spoke. “This man be being more powerful than Mr. Albus.”

Gellert drew in his breath with a long hiss. Albus looked at him. “You’re married, remember.”

“I wasn’t—for the love of Merlin, Albus, now is _not _the time to joke!”

“You always think it is,” Albus muttered, and returned his attention to Izzy. “The Expiscor will lead us to him?”

Izzy nodded. “But it be needing some time to draw on the magic of this changed world and grow used to it. I last be calling it in the world as it was. Follow it tomorrow, Mr. Albus.” She disappeared with a sudden pop.

“I should never have ignored house-elves,” Gellert pronounced solemnly.

“You should never have ignored any of the ones you thought were weak and helpless.”

Gellert thought about it, then said, “No. I think it’s only house-elves.”

Albus sighed and went to eat the meal that had been waiting under Warming Charms since before he started to scry, trying to ignore the fact that he had one of the most powerful weapons in the world hovering in the middle of his drawing room.

And the longing looks that Gellert kept giving it.


	11. Face-to-Face

“Look, Harry, you’ve acted nervous for days now. Does this have something to do with Black?”

Harry blinked and looked up from the practice wand that he’d been adding defensive spells to. Laocoon had decided to branch out from making them just as toys to selling them to parents who were worried about their children being hurt by magic or by accident in public. “I mean, a little? But mostly I’m not sure why I’m nervous.”

“You’re not sure why you’re nervous.” Laocoon’s voice was cool. “I hope that you’re not going to end a contract that brings in as much money as our connection to the Black family does, Harry.”

Harry rolled his eyes. He was comfortable with Laocoon, but this was an example of the kind of thing that meant they would never be close friends. “It’s not a contract, and it’s my connection more than yours, Laocoon.”

“But people have been buying the practice wands like they’re Galleons ever since there was that story about the Black scions using them.”

Harry shrugged and reached for the practice wand in front of him again to avoid showing how distasteful he found the whole fucking thing. Black had gone to the papers to talk about Sirius and Regulus and the wands, and mentioned that they came from Laocoon’s shop. Luckily, he hadn’t mentioned Harry’s name. Harry assumed that was coming if he didn’t respond the way that Black wanted him to.

Which was…bewildering. What Black would take someone who was a half-blood at _best _and from a totally unknown background, and who was stubborn and angry all the time, as a friend, let alone the adoptive brother it seemed Black wanted to make of him?

“Well. As long as you’re not deliberately sabotaging it.”

“No, Laocoon, I’m not. But I have to warn you that the connection will probably only last a few more weeks. Months, at most.”

“Why?”

“Don’t whinge, it’s unbecoming,” Harry snapped at him as he concentrated on funneling a charm against broken bones into the wand in front of him. “And because Black wants something from me, and I’m not going to give it to him, whatever it is, and that frustrates him and he’ll eventually lash out.”

“Whatever it is?”

Harry glanced up, raising an eyebrow. Laocoon had an odd tone in his voice. “Yes,” Harry said slowly. “Whatever it is. I have to admit that I’m not sure if he’s trying to be my friend, or take advantage of my power, or make me some kind of permanent tutor to his children, or find a way to enslave me for the good of his family. But whatever it is, I’m not going to give it to him, and that makes the connection weak.”

Laocoon leaned back against the worktable behind him, his eyes as direct as Harry had ever seen them. “I honestly didn’t realize—Harry, the nature of the connection is perfectly obvious to me. Orion Black wants you as an ally.”

Harry blinked, then shrugged. It would make sense of the different, disparate ways Black had treated him—claiming some kind of life-debt, trying to get him to be a tutor, inviting him over to the house—but he still had no interest in a long-term association. “Oh, well. Then I suppose he’ll probably back away once I prove frustrating.”

“You’re really powerful.”

The Elder Wand vibrated for a second in Harry’s grip. It seemed to think a compliment to Harry’s magical power was a compliment to _it_. Harry refrained from rolling his eyes. “Yeah, I know.”

“That means Black isn’t going to give up easily.”

“But he’s used to being deferred to and getting respect even from pure-bloods. I’m a snotty upstart half-blood who won’t give him that respect.”

“So you _are _sabotaging the connection on purpose!” Laocoon pointed a finger at him that would have been more threatening if Harry hadn’t faced down Death Eaters and Voldemort in his time.

“I don’t want it. I don’t want the interest of a prominent pure-blood family.”

Laocoon rolled his eyes, not as refraining as Harry. “That doesn’t matter. You have it, and your attitude isn’t going to put Black off. Harry, how much do you know about the ways that pure-blood families build alliances?”

“I know they use blackmail and compliments and bribes,” Harry said, and shrugged when Laocoon gaped at him. “Sorry, that’s been my experience,” he added, thinking of the way that Lucius Malfoy had influenced Cornelius Fudge in his first timeline.

“And other things,” Laocoon said quietly. “Offers of marriage. I think that’s where Black is heading, Harry.”

Harry just stared. Then he laughed. Laocoon had never taken a joke this far before, but there was always a first time. “Yes, Laocoon, that’s really funny. Like Orion Black would want to marry a snotty upstart half-blood, and a _man _at that.” He snorted and turned back to the practice wand. “Don’t you have more plausible lies to spread if you’re going to spread them?”

Laocoon leaned forwards and placed his fingers over Harry’s, pinning them to the table. Harry frowned at him. Laocoon was slightly shaking his head, and he looked as if he was about to start scolding Harry, but then he managed to get hold of himself.

“This is no joke,” he said. “This is no lie. Pure-bloods have married people before to secure their alliance to a particular family, and if they already have children, no one objects if they marry someone who couldn’t give them any. I want you to at least consider what’s here and what you could be giving up.”

Harry blinked several times, then sighed. “Well, it wouldn’t matter anyway, Laocoon. Orion Black couldn’t pay me to marry him.”

“Is that so?”

Harry sighed as Black’s voice came from the door of the shop, and turned around to look at him. Black was giving him a tight smile, but his eyes weren’t focused on Harry’s. They were locked on the work table. Harry turned to follow his line of sight, wondering whether the man was so infuriated as all that that Harry was making more of the practice wands like the ones he had brought to test Sirius and Regulus with.

Then he realized. Black’s eyes were on the place where Laocoon still pinned Harry’s hand to the wood.

“If I had realized that you had a suitor already, Mr. Evanson,” Black went on, gaze raking up and down Laocoon, “I would have _backed off._”

The words sounded like a dragon about to flame. Laocoon hastily let go of Harry’s hand and backed up towards the far wall of the shop, waving his arms around. “You’ve got it wrong, Mr. Black! I wouldn’t marry _Harry _if he paid me! I was just informing him about the niceties of a pure-blood maybe expressing interest in him—”

“When you _knew _that it was up to the pure-blood in question to explain such intentions?” Black took a flowing step forwards that reminded Harry a lot of the way a Dementor moved along the ground. It wasn’t a comparison that predisposed him any better towards Black. “Then I suppose I shall have to tailor the curse I give you more precisely than I planned to, Palmer.”

“What curse?” Harry asked, and stepped in between Black and Laocoon. Black came to a halt and considered him, not seeming upset at the close proximity. Harry forced himself not to flinch when Black lifted his hand to let it hover near Harry’s cheek, although he didn’t actually touch him. “Explain to me why you would be able to curse my employer.”

“I violated etiquette by talking about his interest,” Laocoon whispered. “He’s right. I deserve a curse as punishment. I should have remembered that it was up to him to declare it.”

“That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever fucking heard,” Harry said, and grinned fiercely when he saw the way both Laocoon and Black turned to stare at him. _That’s right, that’s what I am, crass and not someone you can just draw into these games. _“I don’t live my life by those rules because, guess what, _I’m not a pure-blood. _If you don’t want me to tutor your sons or otherwise involved with them, Black, just tell me. But don’t try to play some trick on me where you tell me that you have the right to curse my employer and expect me to believe you.”

“It is an ancient custom.” Black was staring at Harry as if he had sprouted dragon scales, but then he glared at Laocoon again. “Not one that—that many people would violate—”

“Stop glaring at Laocoon, he had to tell me because I had no idea,” Harry said. “And frankly, considering the way I would have punched in your face if you told me, you should be grateful to him.”

Black turned away from Laocoon, which was all Harry had wanted. Laocoon stood up and brushed his robes off, but wasn’t bright enough to retreat. Harry held in his sigh. “Why would you have—struck me?”

“Because I’m not some weapon you can _own_ or some asset you can _buy_.” Harry knew that his magic had picked up and was whirling around the room in subtle winds, from the way he saw papers flutter out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t care. Maybe Black would even take the hint and back the fuck off. “I don’t care about your rules. I don’t care about the customs. I care about protecting children and doing what I can to make up for wrongs I committed and protecting my own freedom.”

“If you want to make up for this harm that you claim you caused the Black family,” Black began.

“I’m not going to make myself a _slave _to do it, Black.”

“I was considering you for a marriage partner! You ought to know that’s the opposite of a slave bond.”

“Considering what your first marriage was like, I’m not convinced that you know the difference.”

Black’s face was twisted with a desperation and madness that made him look like a combination of the adult Sirius and Bellatrix from Harry’s original timeline. Harry caught up the Elder Wand as Black drew his wand.

Black did pause and take one deep breath that might have been his attempt to restore calm to the situation, but that ended when Harry called, “You probably had some speech prepared about how grateful I should be for your attentions when I’m a half-blood, right?”

“I am going to—”

“I hope that we’re not interrupting anything.”

Harry spun in a crouch to face the door of the shop. There were two elderly wizards there, one in bright robes, with something silver hovering in front of them—

One of them was _Albus Dumbledore. _And based on the pictures that Harry had sometimes seen in the papers since he arrived here and his faint memories of photographs from his other timeline, the other one had to be his husband, Gellert Grindelwald.

Panic flooded Harry, and the Elder Wand stirred in his grasp like a living thing. Harry slashed it hard across the air, thinking with thoughts as forceful as his channeled magic, _Make them forget everything from today!_

*

Albus watched in some curiosity as the young man that the Expiscor appeared to have targeted made the motion for the Memory Charm. The magic soared out and dissolved against one of the silver points of the weapon. At the same time, the diamonds in those points flashed once, and it moved closer to him.

“You’re the one we were looking for, I think,” Albus said, after a quick look at the other two people in the shop. One of them was Orion Black, a surprise and yet not. The Blacks had far too great a propensity for dabbling in time travel. The other was someone Albus didn’t know, but who could be easily _Obliviated _if necessary. “The time traveler?”

Black’s eyes widened, and the shopkeeper, as he must be, gaped at the dark-haired young man in the center of the shop. Ah, then they had _not _known. Albus felt a twinge of conscience that he and Gellert couldn’t have confronted the man in private, but then again, he had no desire to play around with someone who had managed to hide himself from the Ministry so thoroughly.

“_Frangere_!”

This time, the spell that sped from the dark brown wand the stranger clutched—which seemed to hum unpleasantly, in rhythm with a buzzing in Albus’s teeth—struck true. Albus fell back with his own wand upraised, but the time traveler had aimed for the Expiscor, nor him or Gellert.

The Expiscor made an unpleasant noise of its own as the Breaking Hex collided with its silver star, but continued to hover. However, one of the points broke off, and the diamonds gave a second, sudden flash that told Albus the protection it had given them from spells like the Memory Charm was likely ended.

Gellert made a wounded sound and said, “If you would _care _to explain yourself—”

The young man was already moving, though, rolling underneath the table and from there using his wand to blast a hole in the wall at about waist height. He dived forwards and through it so smoothly that Albus found himself caught flat-footed. He moved almost like someone who had had Auror training.

Of course, who knew what war he might have fought in, and even broken time trying to set right?

“Gellert—” Albus caught his husband’s eye as he bent over the broken Expiscor, and Gellert sighed but began to run after their fugitive. Albus turned to Black and the shopkeeper with a faint smile. As the Minister for Magic, he was the better one to soothe ruffled feathers, assuming that the two men had them.

“Why were you attacking my employee?” the shopkeeper asked before Albus could get a word in edgewise.

Albus shook his head. “We did not mean to. I, for one, didn’t know he would take it as an attack. I wanted to speak with him. What is his name?’

“Harry Evanson,” began the shopkeeper, which told Albus nothing. Evanson wasn’t a familiar name in any way, which made him wonder if it was assumed. Although Albus had labored to change things, Muggleborns still didn’t have the same rights as pure-blood wizards.

“Why do you want to know?” asked Black, taking a step forwards.

Albus eyed him. Yes, it was likely Black had known about the time travel before this no matter what his reactions were. There was no reason for him to be involved with a random employee of a shop in Diagon Alley. “He traveled in time.”

“What is your proof of that?”

That was not a question Albus had expected, but perhaps he should have. Of course Black would try to protect his investment, which was worth less if other people knew about it. He nodded to the broken Expiscor on the floor. “This is a device that can find those who traveled in time. We knew someone had—”

“And you think that you had the right to find that person and startle him into flight? Why?”

Albus held back the temptation to ask Black why he cared about that instead of about the chance to take advantage of a time traveler’s knowledge. “Of course we did,” he said gently. “There is evidence that he has already altered the timeline. I don’t wish to kill him. I think that’s barbaric. But we need to secure him and find out what he knows.”

“He’s been my assistant,” the shopkeeper volunteered. “For two years. He’s never tried to change anything. I don’t think he has any ambition. That’s just—not Harry.”

“He has already changed things,” Albus corrected. He sighed at the looks on their faces. He hoped he wouldn’t have to Memory Charm them, but it might be for the good of everyone involved. If Black had truly not known, he would seek to use the time traveler, and the shopkeeper seemed a simple soul who couldn’t understand the contribution to chaos that time magic would make. “He has altered the original timeline. We are, in fact, lucky that the shards assembled into a stable universe.”

He heard footsteps behind him and turned, only to find Gellert standing there empty-handed. He met Albus’s eyes and shook his head.

Albus sighed. “We will have to contact Izzy again.” He handed the broken Expiscor to Gellert and turned back to Black and the shopkeeper. He wouldn’t use the Memory Charm on them after all, since it was possible this Evanson would come back to them if they had a connection with him. “You’ll tell us when you see Evanson again?”

The shopkeeper nodded quickly, but Black took longer to say, “Very well, Minister. I suppose you would be the best-situated to deal with time travelers.”

“Know that we will intervene if he comes to harm, Black.”

It was Gellert who said that, and Albus gave him a questioning look as they left the shop. “Why do you think Black would try to harm him?”

“There is a ritual to gain more powerful magic which requires the human sacrifice of a time traveler.”

Albus shuddered. Yes, Gellert would know, practitioner of the Dark Arts that he was—had been. And if there was any family that would practice an art so Dark even Gellert thought it something to flinch away from, it was the Blacks.

Albus himself was irritated, but not overly-concerned. They had traced the traveler once by house-elf magic. They could find him again that way, and this time, they would know better than to underestimate him.

*

Orion left the shop with a smile that he could barely suppress. Palmer seemed intent on reporting Evanson to the Ministry the moment he saw him again, but Orion was going to send an owl that would extend a Portkey and a permanent invitation.

A _time traveler._

Orion could not imagine the knowledge that Evanson held. The mysteries that he might be able to solve and the questions he could answer!

Orion would go against the Minister, the former Dark Lord Grindelwald, the entire Ministry, to offer shelter to such a one. And his determination to bind Evanson to the family in some way had only increased.

For now, though, the best lure he had was in his sons and Evanson’s fondness for them. Orion smiled as he ruffled Sirius’s hair when he came into the house, gathered Regulus close for a hug, and then went to write a very-carefully-worded letter.


	12. Stutter-Start

Harry leaned against the corner of the stationery shop in Knockturn Alley, Disillusioned as only the Elder Wand could make him, and closed his eyes in despair.

He supposed that he should have known someone would find out about the time travel eventually, but he had been spared, perhaps unfairly, by the fact that the first person who had done it was Mariana, and she had been willing to strike a deal. It had made him assume that others would want to strike a deal.

Instead of—what? Expose him? Execute him? Drag him to the Department of Mysteries to investigate him? Harry didn’t even know if the Department of Mysteries in this universe would have invented Time-Turners.

Harry ran a weary hand over his face. Well, he had blown up the life he’d built here, and he would have to come up with other plans, without a friendly Laocoon to give him shelter this time.

At least one more trip back to Laocoon’s shop was essential. He had to retrieve his back wages, his cauldron, his books, his clothes, and other things that he doubted he would be able to live comfortably without.

Then he would have to find a place to sleep for the night. And an owl so that he could send Mariana a message about rescheduling the tutoring session he’d originally had set with Severus for Wednesday.

Harry sighed. Yes, this was such a mess. But he had little choice other than to work with it. This was his life now. It had been since the night he’d shattered _the entire universe._

Part of him did wonder if he deserved Azkaban or execution or whatever else they would inflict on him for being a time traveler, considering how he had caused more damage than Voldemort, but his mind always caught on Severus and Sirius and Regulus. If he was in prison or similar, he wouldn’t be able to help them.

He straightened up, ready to move, and then froze as he watched a raven winging straight towards him. It didn’t even seem to notice the Disillusionment Charm, although it did land in front of him and then startle up again, wings out, when he moved. Harry stopped and waited, and the raven landed and strutted towards him. Its expression was as frankly dubious as he had ever seen on a bird.

“Messenger?” Harry asked, barely moving his lips.

The raven gave a solitary croak and extended a leg. Harry used the Elder Wand to unbind the letter and bring it to him without hurting the raven, although it gave him another long stare, as though reconsidering any good opinion it might hold of him. It then flitted up to the top of the crumbling wall next to Harry and settled with a ruffle of its throat hackles to show it was going to wait.

Harry didn’t touch the letter with his fingers, floating it in front of him and using the wand to open it, as well. He sighed when he realized the parchment was covered with Black’s handwriting.

_Dear Harry,_

_I hope that you won’t snap at me for calling you by your first name. I likewise hope that you don’t think your value has changed in my eyes because you have shown yourself to be a time traveler. Quite the contrary._

Harry sighed and shook his head. Of course Black would think that being a time traveler added to his “value” somehow. Harry wished he could have told the fool exactly what he thought of his valuation of people, but he was never going to speak to Black again, so it didn’t matter.

_I want to offer you sanctuary. If you think it would be too obvious to come to Grimmauld Place, since after all Dumbledore and his husband did see you in my company, then I have many other small houses scattered in many places. The Minister may know about some of them, but not all of them. And there are wards that will keep you safe even if someone is standing in the same room and looking right at you._

_For the sake of my sons, I hope that you will accept my offer. They adore you, and I do not say that lightly. They did not extend such affection to any of the other tutors hired for them, or to their own mother, for reasons which I think you know. _

_I will keep you safe, and all I ask in return is that you consider sharing your knowledge with me and becoming a Black. I do not even _demand _that you share it. That is something for you to decide. But I want you to know that whatever your change in the timeline may have cost the Black family, I, at least, reckon it worth the price._

Black had signed his full name with a huge flourish. Harry rolled his eyes and also rolled the parchment, into a small, compact shape that he tossed at the raven who was watching him from the roof.

“No reply.”

He’d taken three steps when the raven swooped down at his face, wings fluttering in his eyes as it croaked at him. Harry ducked, wand rising, but that gave the raven enough time to pick up the parchment and circle around in front of him again. It landed and stared straight at him, wings wagging suggestively.

“No.” Harry didn’t say it loudly. Even in Knockturn Alley, there would be people listening if the thin air spoke to a raven, especially one that was carrying a message.

The raven bobbed its head and fluffed its feathers again, then hopped closer and settled down in front of Harry as though on a perch. Harry tried to step around it, and the raven lifted its head, threw its wings out, and opened its beak.

It didn’t croak, but the threat was obviously there.

“You fucking bird,” Harry hissed under his breath as he snatched up the parchment. “I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you that I don’t have any quills or ink to write with?”

It might have occurred to the raven, but it didn’t seem to care. It sat back and preened its feathers while Harry stared at the parchment.

Part of him said that he shouldn’t reject the one offer of an ally that he was likely to get, and he did want to see Sirius and Regulus again. But he had one more place he could turn to, and someone who he had to see in person at least one more time. Sirius and Regulus, as cute as he found them, didn’t have as much of his commitment as Severus did.

He raised the Elder Wand and spelled the words onto the parchment. He smiled a little. If this didn’t convince Black to leave him alone, then nothing would.

Harry really hoped it worked, though. He didn’t want to have to deal with Black and his raven for weeks.

He tossed the parchment at the raven, who leaped into the air, snatched it, and flew off. Harry touched the Elder Wand to his chest and focused as hard as he could on the feeling of his Invisibility Cloak draped over him, the silkiness of the material, the sensation of hiding in a corner of Hogwarts desperate not to breathe as Filch and his cat came nearer and nearer…

When he opened his eyes, he smiled. There was a slight starriness about his vision, and when he moved, he could hear the whispering of the Cloak around him.

Now to retrieve his belongings from Laocoon’s shop and then find a place to sleep.

*

Orion hadn’t expected a response from Harry so quickly, but he understood when he opened the parchment.

_Fuck off, Black._

Orion considered what to do for a moment. His anger at the crude words had reared like a cobra and then almost immediately dissolved. After all, that was what Harry was _trying _to make him do, grow so angry that he would abandon his pursuit.

He must not understand the full implications of what being a time traveler meant, or he would know that far more people than Orion would soon be pursuing him, and for reasons far more unkind.

Orion leaned back against the wall outside the nursery and looked in so that he could watch his sons. Sirius was using the practice wand Harry had brought him and managing to create controlled sparks. Regulus was studying the other wand with an absorbed expression. Orion had been concerned about that at first, but Harry had reassured him, saying that some children liked to feel how the wand interacted with their magic before using it.

Orion nodded slowly. Yes, he had to have Harry as a tutor for his sons even if the man never agreed to marriage. And to keep other families from using the time traveler against him as a weapon.

That meant taking a more active role.

*

Harry stepped into Laocoon’s shop under the thick Disillusionment Charm like the Invisibility Cloak, confident that he wouldn’t be seen. It had protected him all the way from Knockturn Alley, after all, with no one even turning to look at him—

“I know that’s you, Harry.”

Harry froze and turned slowly to look at Laocoon. Laocoon had his arms folded and a sad frown on his face. His back was against the door of the small room Harry had lived in for so long, and where he would have to go to get his things.

“I know it’s you,” Laocoon repeated. His eyes were aimed slightly to the left of where Harry actually stood, something that made Harry’s heart begin to beat smoothly again. So he _couldn’t _see through the charm. “I know you. And I’m good at defensive spells. It takes a lot for one to fool me.”

Harry said nothing, and didn’t shift his weight. Laocoon stood up straighter and shook his head. “And you have to realize why time travel magic was outlawed in this world—although I suppose it might not have been in yours.”

Harry remained silent. It would be easy enough to move Laocoon out of the way, but he did want to hear this.

Laocoon waved his hands in the air. “Why do time travelers want to break the universe? It was fine just the way it was! But that’s what they always want to do, is put the pieces together in a configuration that favors them personally.” He peered again in Harry’s direction. “I suppose this is the only chance I’ll have to ever make that question become more than rhetorical. Why _do _you want to break the universe?”

He waited for longer than Harry thought he would in the face of Harry’s silence, but finally gave an enormous snort and began to pack back and forth. “Fine. Be that way. Anyway. Time travel magic is the ultimate weapon. It could erase people from existence, and no one would even remember they were gone. It could, if you were powerful enough and had enough control of it, twist the world into what you wanted it to be. You could win any war, survive any conquest, make the world the way you wanted it to be _forever _by erasing books and ideas and rebellious movements.” He glared at Harry over his shoulder. “Do you see?”

Harry held back the protest that burned his tongue: that he hadn’t meant to do anything of that, that it had been a total accident. From what Laocoon was saying, no one would believe that, anyway. And again he huffed and kept explaining in a few minutes.

“That’s assuming that someone really did know what they were doing with it. It would be much more likely, according to all the theories and because it hasn’t been studied much, to have created a void filled with nothingness.” He turned around and his eyes were suddenly direct and sharp in a way Harry had never seen on his face. “_You could have killed everyone, you fucker._”

Harry had known he was lucky. And he carried a load of guilt around over what he had done to Severus and the Blacks and probably other people he would never meet. He didn’t need Laocoon to tell him that.

But it was the first time he’d thought about it in a while. He closed his eyes to absorb the blow, and took a deep breath.

And Laocoon sprang. His hands locked on Harry’s arm instead of his shoulders, which it looked like he’d been aiming for, but he still caught hold of Harry and spun him around, his face triumphant. Harry found himself gaping at Laocoon, and the Disillusionment Charm on him broke with a soft pop like a soap bubble.

“You should have known better than to speak to someone who actually cared about his world,” Laocoon growled.

“You were the one who insisted that your Divination professor had told you I’d be important in your life!” Harry snapped, more flustered than he’d expected. He was reminded forcefully, again, that he had obligations here, but he couldn’t expect any in return. People would either hate him or seek to use him if they found out who he really was.

He’d even thought Laocoon was a friend, in a way.

“And I should have realized that it didn’t mean you could work in my shop.” Laocoon shook his head. “Instead, I’m going to become famous for following my duty and turning you in to the Ministry.”

He raised his wand. The Elder Wand gave a vicious thrum in Harry’s hand, and he realized that he had to decide what to do. Otherwise, it would be up to the wand, and that would be unlikely to spare Laocoon the consequences of his own actions.

He whispered, “_Obliviate._”

This time, there was no supernatural weapon protecting Laocoon from the consequences of the spell. He faltered and looked around the shop, blinking hard. Then he looked at Harry. “Hello. Who are you?” He let go of Harry’s arm a second later, and flushed. “I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know what I was—what’s happening?”

The Elder Wand had gone for a comprehensive Memory Charm, then. Harry felt a slight ache in his chest, but ignored it. Laocoon’s words were true, in a way. Harry should have known better than to get so deeply involved with someone native to this timeline. “I don’t know,” Harry murmured. “I walked into the shop, and you looked like you were on the verge of fainting. Then you grabbed me and started shouting some strange things. I cast a charm that should have got rid of most fevers. Did that help?”

“Oh, Merlin, I’ve been overworking again.” Laocoon shook his head with a faint grimace. “Ever since my last assistant quit, I’ve been doing this. Ungrateful bastard. I should never have paid him as much as I did.”

“Well, maybe you’ll find someone else,” Harry said, as diplomatically as he could. The Elder Wand was flicking behind his back, undoing the locks on the cupboards in the other room that had been his and freeing and Disillusioning their contents. “I actually came in here because I heard that you sold practice wands that could help focus a child’s magic.”

“Oh, of course!” Laocoon beamed at him. “Of course, yes. Come with me, and I’ll show you the best ones.”

Harry bought three, while his Disillusioned possessions flew over to him. He would send two by owl to Sirius and Regulus, once he found the public owlery.

And he would take the third with him for the day he saw Severus for the last time. He wanted the gift to be presented in person. Likewise, Severus deserved an in-person apology for why Harry wouldn’t be seeing him again after that.

Harry’s mind was made up. Laocoon’s words had recalled him to a sense of what was proper rather than really being something new. He had no right to stay here.

*

Mariana looked at the parchment in front of her and shook her head slowly.

“Grandmother, what is it?”

Mariana sighed and reached out to gently put a hand on Severus’s shoulder, the only kind of touch that she dared when Seneca was in the house. There was standing up to him and using a Memory Charm on him, and then there was suicide.

“I’m afraid that Mr. Evanson wants to change the arrangement,” she said, rolling up the parchment. “He has lost his position at Mr. Laocoon’s shop and would rather that we didn’t go there again. Mr. Evanson seems to think that he will have to stop tutoring you, but he said that he will come—”

“I don’t _want _him to stop.”

Mariana felt her lips lift in a smile that was entirely involuntary. Once Severus had made up his mind about something, mountains falling on his head wouldn’t be able to move him. “I know that, of course, Severus,” she said. “But Mr. Evanson says that he has to leave for the good of everyone. It’s rather mysterious.”

In truth, Mariana thought that Harry probably just didn’t want to trust the truth to owl post. It likely had something to do with his time travel. But she wouldn’t say that as she watched Severus’s face twist with determination. He might never be handsome, with the unfortunate Prince facial features and the scar on his forehead, but he could manage awe-inspiring, she thought.

“He’s going to stay.”

“Well, we would have to find another place for your lessons, Severus.”

“He could come here.”

“Your grandfather would make that difficult.”

“I think Harry is a match for Grandfather.”

Mariana blinked and then let her protest die away without being spoken. She was about to say that of course Harry wasn’t, but—well, _she _had stood up to Seneca. He wasn’t as unconquerable as she had always thought. Why couldn’t someone as powerful as Harry fend off her husband? A time traveler, his magic thrumming around him even if he seemed to prefer that people would ignore that, and someone who could accept all of Severus’s oddities…

Of course Mariana had never really intended to let the tutoring sessions stop. But it was wonderful what a strong ally she had in her grandson.

“Then let’s tell him that in the letter, dear one,” she murmured and bent down to brush her hand over his scar. “Do you want to write it yourself?”

Severus nodded and tore towards his bedroom. Mariana followed with a smile and a heart more fond and hopeful than she had thought she would ever allow herself three years ago.

Severus was her reason for living on the earth, and if he wanted Harry Evanson to continue as his tutor, Mariana would just have to make sure it happened.


	13. A Young Prince

Harry studied the ravine in front of him, where Mariana had told him to Apparate, with a frown. He didn’t think she would have anything to gain from betraying him, not when people would find out that she’d known he was a time traveler for a long time and done nothing, but this place looked like a deserted patch of overgrown woods.

Then Harry took a single step forwards, and the woods _changed._

It was the most disorienting set of wards Harry had ever been through, assuming it was wards at all and not some other kind of defensive spell. The boulders that had ringed the edges of this slash in the earth were suddenly gone, and the trees bowed down and whirled like dancers and formed the sides of a fence. The earth itself grew green and shook a spring into existence, and Harry was on the edge of extensive, fenced grounds, so far back from the house that he wasn’t sure where it was.

_Well, at least I know she didn’t betray me, _Harry thought, and started towards the gates, one hand on his wand. Mariana’s warnings about her husband hadn’t slipped his mind.

But no one accosted him, and the gates swung silently open at his approach. They parted down the middle through a large silver decoration that, when Harry looked at it more closely, formed a crown.

Harry snorted. _Someone _took their Prince heritage overly-seriously. Of course, from Mariana’s stories, it was her husband and not her, especially since she hadn’t been born into the family.

The path led on and through shady trees, past flowerbeds and more springs and streams and ponds and pools, and swaying grass that rustled as though a predator was stalking Harry through it. Harry kept his gaze fixed straight ahead and walked on, and eventually the motion stopped and left him to round a corner and come upon the house.

It was a bleak grey place. Harry studied the few windows that looked towards the path and then shrugged. He wouldn’t see anyone looking out at him from behind the high shutters. At least they didn’t have bars on them.

_Visible ones, anyway, _Harry reminded himself, and walked on.

The front door swung open before he could get there, but it was Mariana waiting for him, not a house-elf. She gave him a relieved smiled and held out both hands to take his and draw him into the house. “I’m so glad you came, Harry. Seneca is out of town on a business trip, so you don’t have to worry about him.”

“Or about the house-elves reporting to him?” Harry inquired, watching out of the corner of his eye as one of the little creatures appeared and tried to take his cloak. He seemed miffed when Harry wouldn’t give it up, and popped away again.

“If the house-elves are loyal to anyone in this house, it’s Severus,” Mariana said simply. “They recognize something special about him.” She motioned towards an open door at the end of a dark corner. “He’s this way.”

Harry passed shut doors and shrouded mirrors and pedestals in alcoves that held stern busts, silently reciting in his head what he was going to say. He wanted to stay and help Severus, of course he did, but things would be safer for everyone if he left. He hoped he had the right tone of sadness and sternness when he spoke to Severus. There was no need to be hard on him. He was just a kid, after all.

He entered the room that looked to be the schoolroom, with a set of cauldrons in one corner and a huge slate on the wall held numbers and letters. Harry hardly had time to take it in, or the carpet on the floor that had dazzling swirls of white and grey, before Severus stepped forwards and claimed his attention. “You’re not going away.”

“I wish I didn’t have to,” Harry said quietly. “And it might be that I could come back every few months by Floo or Apparition and see you. But it’s not safe for any of us if I stay here longer.”

“Why?” Severus folded his arms. Even like this, he looked imperious.

“Someone might find out that I’ve used magic they don’t approve of, and take me away,” Harry said. “And then you’ll suffer, too. I know your family has enemies, and you do because of the scar on your forehead. I don’t want to contribute to that.”

Severus stared at him in silence. There was so much silence, in fact, that Harry found himself glancing towards Mariana out of the corner of his eye. She just gave him an amused smile and shook her head a little, as if to say that she was going to stay out of it. Harry understood the impulse, but it annoyed him she was following it.

“You need to stay and help me study magic,” Severus said.

“It would be dangerous for you. I just said—”

“Would my enemies go away if you went away?”

“No, but they would stop paying as much attention to you as they’ll pay if I’m here.”

Severus nodded as if everything had already made sense and been arranged. “Then my choice is between enemies with you and enemies without you. I want enemies with you. You’re going to stay.” He turned to Mariana. “Grandmother, can the house-elves bring some biscuits? Mr. Harry doesn’t look like he ate yesterday.”

Harry stared at him with his mouth open, then turned to Mariana. Sometimes he hated Severus’s magically-influenced intelligence. “Can’t you explain it to him?” he asked. “The kind of danger that he’s going to be in?”

“I hardly understand it myself, Harry. You weren’t very clear in your message, and I don’t think any excuse you can make for leaving would be acceptable to Severus.”

She was _definitely _smiling at him. Harry exhaled in slow disbelief and faced his protégé again. Severus was picking up a chocolate biscuit from a tray that had arrived without Harry even noticing and was sitting on a small table next to him. “You need to eat,” he said, and held it out.

“No, thank you. I’m not hungry.’

“That’s why you’re so skinny,” Severus said, in the tones of someone who had discovered an essential truth of the universe and was about to share it with everyone he meant. “You’ve got to eat, Mr. Harry. Even when you’re not hungry and you might not enjoy the food, you have to eat.”

“Why?” Harry took the biscuit, to please Severus, but didn’t eat it.

Severus put his own biscuit in his mouth and chewed carefully, as if to show Harry how it was done. “Because otherwise you won’t grow up big and strong,” he said. “And if I have all these enemies, then I need all the strength I can get. And you need to be strong, to be my protector.”

At the moment, Severus sounded so serious and so much like the man who had been destroyed when Harry had destroyed the timeline that he had to swallow back tears. He shook his head and ate the biscuit because he _was _hungry, and then turned to Mariana. “There’s no way I can stay here. Not with your husband and the house-elves being more loyal to him than any guest. They won’t hide me from him.”

Mariana smiled. “I am still pleased that you’re considering it. You never wanted to leave at all, did you?”

Harry took a deep breath and shook his head. “No. But the Minister and his husband are searching for me. You don’t have a choice.”

“We have a _choice_.” Severus finished his biscuit and took a step towards Harry, staring up, but not in a way that made him any less intimidating. “I’ll use my power to make them leave you alone.”

Harry blinked at him. “You can’t.”

“Of course he can,” Mariana said, and stepped further around the small table to put a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “You forget that he’s the Boy-Who-Lived. That’s the power he’s talking about, Harry, not his magic.”

Harry snorted. “You think that’s a source of power? The papers will turn on him as soon as look at him.”

He knew his voice was more bitter than it should be, and from the narrow-eyed look Mariana gave him, she’d noticed it. But she shook her head and said, “Perhaps for some Muggle celebrities it works that way. I’ve been carefully cultivating Severus’s image for the papers, though, and Seneca has done even more. We’ve made sure that the people of the wizarding world feel like they know Severus, and they would do a lot to protect him. I thought you knew that, but—you don’t pay much attention to the papers, do you?”

Harry shook his head. Laocoon had brought them into the shop often enough, so Harry had known the photographs of the Minister and his husband to recognize them, but he had avoided all the articles about the Boy-Who-Lived out of instinctive self-defense.

“I would still bring a lot of danger to you.” He glanced at Mariana. “The Minister and his husband know—a lot about me.”

Mariana’s eyes widened this time, and Harry relaxed a little. At least she understood the danger about him being declared a time traveler, and that meant she was more likely to be on his side.

“We know a lot about you, too,” said Severus, still frowning up at Harry. “We’re going to keep you here.”

“There could be a compromise,” Mariana said swiftly. Harry wasn’t sure who the swiftness was for, him or Severus or herself. “For example, we could ensure that you be placed in a position where the Minister would find you acceptably under his eye, but also where you would still have access to reach Severus. And the Black children, too, if that’s what you want.”

“Black is an—” Harry glanced at Severus.

“I know the word ‘arsehole,’” Severus said proudly.

Mariana only shook her head. “With his grandfather, it was inevitable,” she murmured. “And yes, there are positions that would satisfy the restrictions I am thinking of. For example, from what I’ve head, the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts wants to retire, but is picky about his replacement.”

Harry felt his left eye twitch violently, and Mariana stared at him. “Is something wrong?”

“Nothing I could really explain,” Harry sighed. Well, there seemed to have been no curse on the Defense position here. “It’s just that from the way they came after me, I don’t think Dumbledore or Grindelwald will agree to that. They want me in prison or dead, I think.” He glanced down when something nudged his hand and found that Severus had shoved the plate of biscuits at him.

“They want you under control, if I know them.”

Harry considered Mariana carefully as he took another biscuit. “And do you? Know them, I mean.” He had only interacted with this Dumbledore and Grindelwald for a few minutes, of course, but they hadn’t seemed the sort who would compromise, to him.

Mariana nodded. “By now they will have overcome some of their surprise that you exist, and they will be able to start planning for the long run. They also have to suspect that you would be able to get out of a prison cell or the Department of Mysteries, if they tried to place you there.”

Harry snorted. “How? The only way I got away from them at first was their sheer surprise.”

“And you have remained away from them,” Mariana said. “Whatever they used to track you, can they do it again?”

Harry shrugged. “I have to admit I didn’t know what that object they used to track me was. I damaged it, but they could probably make or use another one. Whatever it was.”

“But you might also be able to break it again.” Mariana was staring at him intently, one hand combing absently through her long black hair. “They’ll be thinking of that. And time travelers can give knowledge and possibly magic to those they choose to help. And it will not look good for the Minister if someone comes to know that they let a time traveler slip through their fingers for two years.”

Harry looked anxiously at Severus. Severus just looked unreadably back, and Harry sighed. “Someone could read the knowledge out of his mind.”

“Legilimency on a child so young is something not even Grindelwald would do,” Mariana said, and then she smiled briefly. “Not when he is married to our Minister. And as he grows, we will teach him to shield his mind.”

Harry kicked one of his boots idly against the table leg, and stopped only when Mariana gave him a look. “Then you’re thinking that you could contact them, and—propose a compromise? Is that what you’re saying?”

“_We_ will. Severus is not wrong about his power as the Boy-Who-Lived. We will tell them that they could have a political mess on their hands, or they could have a quiet little compromise that will also stand the chance of making Headmaster Dippet indebted to them, and allow Professor Greyhand the chance to retire.”

Harry considered that in silence, at least until Severus poked him in the side and said, “You’re not thinking of leaving again, are you? You’d _better _not.”

“Severus,” Mariana chided, with a shake of her head. “I’ve taught you better than to poke people.”

“You said I could do it when I had to,” Severus retorted, and turned that intense gaze on Harry again. It had always been hard for Harry to meet, and it was more so now that it was beneath that lightning bolt scar. “I know you. I know you don’t want to leave, and I don’t want to let you leave, either. So you’re going to be the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts. There, that’s settled.” He nodded in satisfaction and picked up another biscuit.

Harry chuckled a little. “You did teach him well.”

“I don’t think you had a plan,” Mariana said quietly, instead of commenting on that. “Other than to run and hope that you could draw any pursuers away with you and they wouldn’t find out about your connection with Severus. Is that true?”

Harry sighed and gave in to the temptation to run his hand roughly through his hair. “Yeah. But—I mostly wanted to get away from here before they could track you down, or Severus, through me.”

“It doesn’t matter if they do.” Severus had got his nose as high into the air as Malfoy had managed once upon a time. “I’m the Boy-Who-Lived. They can’t _touch _me.”

“Maybe that’s true,” Harry said, although privately he wondered if Mariana had really cultivated Severus’s image as carefully as she thought she had. “But there’s also the other kind of peril time travelers can bring.”

“What do you mean?” Severus demanded.

Harry glanced again at Mariana, uneasily, but she gave no sign of disapproval, so he took a deep breath and decided to explain. “I destroyed one universe when I came back in time. A different universe replaced it. I knew—some of the people who are here now in my original universe, but they were different.”

“Was I there?”

“You were.” Harry nodded carefully. “But you weren’t the Boy-Who-Lived.”

Severus’s mouth dropped open. Mariana looked more amused than anything as she gently ruffled his hair. “And me?”

“I didn’t know you then,” Harry said.

He had no idea what had happened to Severus’s grandparents in the original world. All he remembered hearing was that they had disowned their daughter for marrying a Muggle. And who knew after that? They could have died early, they could have lived through the war sad and bitter, they could have left the country.

Most likely, Seneca and Mariana Prince hadn’t even been Severus’s grandparents at that point.

“Very well. Then tell me how you believe you have hurt us?”

“You could have been happier in the original world. How do I know that I didn’t deprive you of that happiness?”

“How do you know that you didn’t make us happier?”

Harry paused. It was true that he thought Severus was probably happier being raised by a loving grandmother than he had been being raised in an abusive household, but Seneca was abusive in his own way, and the burdens Severus would have to face as the Boy-Who-Lived were ones no child should ever pick up.

Harry should know _that._

“I can’t know,” he said finally. “But from what Laocoon said, I could also have broken the universe into nothingness.”

Mariana snorted. “That is one theory of time travel. But the magic I used to sense you never would have become possible if every time traveler ran that serious risk. There have been more of you than you think, Harry. Obviously I don’t think it should be something that’s done _casually_, but the idea that you have to bear a burden of guilt about it for the rest of your life is nonsense.”

“You can’t be guilty the rest of your life,” Severus added in an authoritative voice. “You have me to teach.”

Harry smiled down at him, and felt something in his chest that had been tight since the talk with Laocoon shift and warm and lighten. He gently touched Severus’s hair again. “I could still teach you if I felt guilty, you know.”

“But you wouldn’t be as good a teacher.”

“And I think I now know why you seem to be resisting the suggestion that you could be the Defense professor at Hogwarts,” Mariana added. “You think you don’t deserve it, don’t you? You believe that you should be—I’m not sure, but punished, perhaps.”

Harry hesitated again. “It would make me feel better,” he said at last.

“Then here is your punishment,” said Mariana, in an unexpectedly ringing voice. “To live in this world that’s not perfect, in a way that’s not perfect. To accept that you aren’t perfect but some people want you around them anyway. To negotiate from a position of strength instead of running. To maintain the bonds you have created rather than forsake them.”

Harry stared at her in amazement. It sounded difficult, it sounded rewarding, it sounded exactly like what he—

Like what he could live with as the price he had to pay for breaking the universe.

Harry swallowed. “As long as you accept that I might have to leave if I ever do put you in danger.”

“We’ll fight for you, though.” Severus sounded puzzled. “Didn’t you know that?”

Harry took a long, slow breath. “I might have forgotten.”

“Well, don’t.”

And Severus pushed him into a chair, and sat him down, and climbed into his lap and ate more biscuits, while Mariana started discussing the plan she had in mind for approaching Dumbledore and Grindelwald.

Harry swallowed, and listened.


	14. From a Position of Strength

“Albus?”

Albus looked up. He couldn’t remember the last time he had heard Gellert sound like that, half-strangled. Even when they had discussed the terms of his surrender and negotiated the visits to a Mind-Healer, he had worn a sneer half the time.

But now he held a letter in his hand and stared at it as if it was the key to making him humble. Albus rose and walked across the drawing room to him. The last few days had been filled with more mundane Ministry business as Izzy had said that she would have to find a way to make sure the time traveler couldn’t damage their next piece of seeking magic, but Albus had the feeling that was about to change.

“Gellert?” he asked quietly, when he came to a stop next to his husband and Gellert had still made no motion to give him the letter.

Gellert started and handed him the letter, then went back to rubbing his hands on his robes, as if he was cold. Albus eyed him and built up the fire with a flick of his wand, but Gellert only gave half a laugh and shook his head.

“If only that would work,” he whispered, then closed his eyes.

More disturbed than he could express, Albus turned to read the letter.

_To Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald, greetings._

_You should know that the time traveler who chooses to call himself Harry Evanson has powerful allies, ones that you would probably not wish to anger. But he is willing to negotiate, and he sees no reason why he can’t grant you a certain oversight of his actions in return for certain considerations._

_He and I have spoken together, and we have come up with a plan. I know that you are seeking a new Defense professor for Hogwarts, but having trouble because Professor Greyhand refuses to retire until he meets someone who fits his standards. I believe Mr. Evanson will fit them. You would know exactly where he was at all times, and he would have to abide by the requirements of the oaths for Hogwarts professors that you introduced in your second term as Minister. In return, he would request that you no longer chase him away from gainful employment and force him to consider abandoning Britain because of your rash actions._

Albus felt a long hiss of breath leave him without his permission. The time traveler had been going to run from _Britain_? That would have increased his ability to cause chaos exponentially. They would have had no idea at all how he would have altered the timeline in other places, other countries.

_I hope this plan meets with at least your thoughtful rejection, if not your approval. If you need to make modifications to it, please send me an owl back. If you are not averse to discussing it as it stands, then I invite you to a meeting between myself, the both of you, and Mr. Evanson in two days’ time, at one-o’clock in the afternoon at the Leaky Cauldron._

_Sincerely,_   
_Mariana Prince._

“Did you know that he would go and make an ally out of the Prince family?” Gellert demanded, snapping the letter back with one hand almost before Albus was done reading and waving it around. “What are we going to do _now_?”

Albus grimaced and shook his head, sitting down on the couch next to Gellert. He wondered now how long Mariana Prince had known about Evanson. Her actions of the last few years, carefully reminding the paper about her grandson’s achievement as the Boy-Who-Lived on more days than just the year or six-month anniversary of his deed, now looked calculated.

Of course, that made him wonder how she had been able to find the time traveler in the first place. Or why she hadn’t reported him to the Ministry.

Albus glanced at the letter, and his plan to bargain back with a hint about Prince’s possible criminal actions faded. She had obviously planned for that. And if she went public about the Ministry pressuring her and that boy, then she wouldn’t have to mention a thing about the time traveler, while Albus would have to explain to the Wizengamot why _he_ hadn’t reported a time traveler the minute he knew there was one.

Not to mention explaining about using a deadly weapon at the instigation of a house-elf…

Albus sighed. “We thought we were cleverer than we were. We should negotiate with them.”

Gellert studied him with narrowed eyes. “What about the damage that Evanson could do to the timeline?”

“According to Izzy, he already did it. We need to make sure that he doesn’t do more, and pushing him into fleeing does that.” Albus shook his head. He really wished this had worked out differently, but perhaps it had been inevitable from the moment they let Evanson slip through their fingers in that Diagon Alley shop. They should have gone in more cautiously, more prepared to trap him, more prepared to see him run.

“We can’t give Prince everything she wants, though.”

“Why not? She’s at least right about this being a reasonable compromise, and that we would know exactly where Evanson was at all times.”

Gellert raised his eyebrows. “What’s to keep her from talking, and letting other people see that this is a good way to pressure the Minister?”

“No one else is grandmother to the Boy-Who-Lived, or has the intimate knowledge she does of the time traveler.” Albus almost laughed when he saw the disgusted expression that crossed Gellert’s face. “Does it pain you that much to admit that we fucked up, and we should have handled the situation more carefully?”

“Yes.” Gellert folded his arms. “I wanted—well, there were ideas I had that might not have come to fruition. But I wanted the chance to _talk _to the man, and this way, he’s not going to think that he owes us the truth. He’ll only think that he owes Prince.”

Albus eyed him and wondered again if Gellert would have asked the man about that other timeline, but it wasn’t time to worry about that right now. “I think we might be able to persuade him to tell the truth, if we represent the advantages of doing so to Prince.”

Gellert snorted and faced the fire. Albus asked his profile, “Is Prince’s owl waiting for us to send a reply?”

Gellert jerked his chin at the letter, and Albus supposed that, after all, he should have known that, given that the letter itself asked for a response. He went to find the quill and parchment, still looking back now and then to watch Gellert over his shoulder.

There were times—days, hours, moments—when he wondered if he knew his husband at all.

*

Harry remained close to Mariana as she guided him through the door of the Leaky Cauldron. Severus had wanted to come, but for once, both Harry and Mariana had been unanimous about his need to stay at home. Harry still felt as jumpy as though he was going to be asked to protect a whole herd of children.

Both Dumbledore and Grindelwald wore disguises, a kind of illusion that Harry had never seen before, rippling and stretching like a film of water as it hovered over their features. It didn’t hide them from Harry, and probably not from Mariana, given that she headed right in their direction. But Harry could catch a glimpse of the pipe-smoking, brown-haired wizards of indeterminate middle age that they would both appear to others.

“Gentlemen. Thank you for coming.”

Mariana’s voice was brisk as she sat down in the chair across from them at the table. Harry ended up snagging a chair from another table where two people glanced at him and waved him on. He was aware that his skin was prickling, and that neither Dumbledore nor Grindelwald had stopped staring at him from the moment he walked through the door.

“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” said Dumbledore, smiling at Harry for a moment. It was odd to see those blue eyes he remembered so well without a twinkle, and flickering in and out behind the illusion of a younger wizard who appeared to have grey ones. “You know who we are, but we didn’t intend to harm you.”

“Someone informed me that I might be held prisoner, or executed,” Harry said, keeping his voice low. Mariana had given them all sharp glances and then went to order food. Harry had already told her he wouldn’t be eating. His stomach was dancing like those illusions. “Excuse me for wanting to avoid that fate.”

“You don’t act like most people who do what you did,” said Grindelwald. He had his hands folded around a mug of beer, both in illusion and in reality, but Harry would be surprised if he’d drunk any of it. “Why did you hide yourself instead of trying to take advantage to changes to the timeline?”

“I didn’t want to break it further.” Harry frowned at the man and glanced at Dumbledore. He had a twinkle in his eyes now, but he was listening intently, so maybe he agreed with Grindelwald. “I think that I hurt everyone I knew personally in my old timeline by changing things, and even people I didn’t know personally probably ended up worse off than they would have. If I’d left things alone…”

Harry trailed off and shook his head. Fine, he wouldn’t talk about that, and he didn’t need Mariana’s slight warning touch to his shoulder as she came back to urge him away from it. It would make him seem both weak and criminal in front of two people who were looking for weaknesses if he started talking like that.

“What was my fate in your original world?”

“I asked you not to ask him about that, Gellert.”

Harry glanced back and forth between the two men, and wondered what was going on there. He decided not to get involved in it, and answered as vaguely as he could. “You didn’t win the war.”

Grindelwald turned from him abruptly and took a long drink from his mug. Mariana shook her head. “You didn’t come to ask him questions you might not want to know the answers to. You know as well as I do what the purpose of this meeting is.”

“Yes. I must ask, Mr. Evanson, what knowledge of Defense you have. While in some ways the solution our friend here proposes is ideal, I will not subject the students of Hogwarts to an untrained and incompetent professor.”

Dumbledore’s words steadied Harry, to his surprise. Maybe it was just that he could appreciate Dumbledore caring for Hogwarts, whether or not he was the Headmaster. He met Dumbledore’s eyes and said quietly, “I fought in a war for several years. I have two years of Auror training under my belt. I led a Defense group for more than twenty of my fellow students one year when _our _Defense professor really was incompetent and untrained. I earned an Outstanding on my Defense NEWT in—another place. I can duel and demonstrate just about any countercurse that you’d like to see of me. I can’t be sure that I’ll impress this Professor Greyhand that Mariana has talked about, but I’m willing to make a good effort.”

Grindelwald leaned forwards. “Was the war against me?”

Harry barely shook his head. He was more inclined to keep looking at Dumbledore, who seemed a little surprised by what Harry had said, but more heartened.

“Well. That’s more than I hoped to get.” Dumbledore paused. “Why didn’t you complete your Auror training?”

Harry grimaced and gestured to the world around them. Dumbledore nodded and paused another moment before asking, “What is your experience with the Dark Arts?”

“Nearly nonexistent.”

“Nearly?”

“I learned what trainee Aurors learn about them, and I cast two Unforgiveables in the course of the war I told you about. I consider the first one necessary still—it was the Imperius Curse used to break into a place we couldn’t have otherwise approached and retrieve an artifact that we had to destroy to harm our enemy. But I used the Cruciatus in a moment of temper, and I regret it.”

“The Killing Curse?”

Harry couldn’t help the flinch of revulsion that traveled over his face. “No. I wouldn’t consider it.”

“So he has flexible morals,” Grindelwald muttered. “We knew that already. Let’s get on to the important questions that you have to ask him.”

“I want to know how our friend here,” Dumbledore said, turning to look at Mariana, “found out about you. And how many more people you intend to expose the secret to.”

“My family possesses an artifact that allows us to sense the presence of time travelers.” Mariana didn’t turn a hair, and Harry blinked, expecting some kind of response from two men he had to assume both knew Legilimency, but nothing. Maybe the lie of “an artifact” was close enough to the Peverell talent she had told him about to pass as truth. “A time traveler greatly harmed my family once in the distant past. My ancestors considered it worthwhile to develop our—gift.”

“I don’t intend to tell the secret to anyone else,” Harry added. “You don’t think it’s shameful enough? I know what I did was wrong. I don’t want to involve anyone else in this. I would have tried to stay in the background for the rest of my life, but—well, I have responsibilities to people here. Responsibilities I thought I could put away. I was going to run.” He glanced at Mariana, who simply gave him a calm, confident smile. “Our friend was the one who convinced me to stay.”

“What kind of responsibilities?”

“I made a commitment to protect and teach a few different children,” Harry said, keeping his eyes fastened on Dumbledore’s. He didn’t want to flinch or back down when Mariana had risked so much to protect him. She was the only reason he was here at all—well, her, and Severus, and Sirius, and Regulus. But she was the only one Grindelwald and Dumbledore would actually get to see. “I didn’t want to abandon them.”

“But you were prepared to.”

“I thought I would endanger them by staying around. Our friend is the one who convinced me that I wouldn’t, that I might even put them in further danger by leaving.” That one was a slight exaggeration, but only slightly.

Grindelwald lifted his wand and cast a spell that made his words muffled. It reminded Harry of the _Muffliato _spell that Snape had created.

His Snape. The Snape of the world he had come from. Harry grimaced a little. He wondered if it was a bad thing that, when he thought the name “Snape” now, his mind corrected it automatically to “Severus” and his mental vision was of a small, mightily frowning little boy, and not a bitter man.

Harry shook his head and focused on the task in front of him. He would probably never have any chance to see any of the people from his original timeline again, and he couldn’t shatter the world a second time because he missed them. He had to pay attention.

“What do you think?” he murmured to Mariana while Dumbledore and Grindelwald talked behind the spell. “Was it enough to convince them?”

Mariana smiled at him. “They’ll probably want some practical demonstrations of your skills, and for you to swear some oaths. Of course, the professors at Hogwarts have to take variations of those oaths. But when they have you bound and some assurance that you won’t run off the way you wanted to, then I don’t see any reason they shouldn’t accept you.”

“The professors at Hogwarts have to take oaths?”

“Of course. Some of them have jobs that make them responsible for the care of hundreds of children. Why would we allow them be around our children without that protection?”

Harry shook his head and said nothing. In his world, no oaths had bound Snape, except the one he had given Dumbledore to protect Harry.

But that was another place, another time. He had to stop thinking of those people. It would only make it harder for him to survive in the world that was his now.

“Mr. Evanson.”

Harry faced Dumbledore again. Someone had removed the privacy spell, and Dumbledore gave him a faint smile.

“What your—friend said was true. We’ll want oaths and a practical dueling demonstration.” Apparently the privacy spell didn’t prevent them from overhearing someone talking, then, Harry thought, even if that person was talking in a whisper. “But we’ll also want the answers to a few questions.”

Harry nodded, not blinking as Dumbledore looked at him. He could only hope that he would feel Legilimency if the man used it.

“What is your true name, and your blood relation to families here?”

Harry let out a long, slow breath. “I don’t know about my mother. I haven’t heard of her or met her here. She may not exist.” He hesitated. “Can I have your word, informally for now, that you won’t approach or harm the family I _used _to belong to here? They’ve done nothing.”

Dumbledore nodded. Grindelwald looked vaguely curious. Harry looked at him, and he rolled his eyes. “It’s probably nothing all that interesting, but yes, my _informal _word as well.”

“Harry Potter. My father was from that family.”

Grindelwald’s eyes widened a little, but Dumbledore only looked pleased. “Yes, I thought you had the look of Fleamont Potter. Well, I’m sure he would be pleased to know that someone from his line succeeded in a different universe.”

“Your word, sir.”

“I can encourage you to approach them, however,” Dumbledore said gently. “Our family is often the only stronghold we have in this troubled world.” He looked weary, and Harry wondered if the same history with Ariana and Aberforth had happened here. Maybe not. Probably not.

“Maybe someday, sir,” Harry said evasively.

“I’m glad that we managed to settle this so amicably,” Dumbledore said, putting his mug on the table. “Shall we go somewhere else to arrange the dueling demonstration and the oaths?”

Harry stood up slowly, still mentally reeling, astonished that they had managed this, and it seemed as if he would in fact get away with shattering the timeline and retaining his connections to people in this time. He glanced at Mariana and found her smiling. She leaned towards him as they left the Leaky Cauldron.

“You _should _talk to the Potters.”

“I don’t want to drag them into this mess.”

Mariana shrugged and said nothing.

It was only later that Harry remembered he hadn’t asked for _her _informal word.


	15. A Necessity

Orion sat back with a certain amount of satisfaction as he watched the owl winging towards him. While he still might wish that Harry had come and found sanctuary with _him_, any place that meant he could have an owl was a good sign. It meant that the Minister hadn’t caught him yet.

The owl landed in the middle of the breakfast table, making Regulus goggle with his mouth open. Orion rolled his eyes a little. “Regulus, no one wants to see half-chewed porridge.”

His son shut his mouth hastily, and Orion took the letter. The owl spread its wings, but only flew to the back of Sirius’s chair. He stared at it and slowly reached up to tickle its breast feathers. The owl watched him tolerantly.

_A reply is expected then. Excellent. _Orion tore the letter open, only humming absently when Sirius asked something about when they would get to see “Mr. Harry” again. He might know the answer to that question in a minute, anyway.

The letter was longer than he’d expected it to be, and as he read on, Orion felt cold grow in his stomach.

_Mr. Black, _

_I thought you would be pleased to know that I have a stable position now, and also that I’ve struck a deal with Minister Dumbledore and his husband. They won’t chase me from place to place if they know where I am, and it turned out they were most worried about me going to another country and changing the timeline, anyway. With me as the new Defense Professor at Hogwarts, assuming the old one accepts me as a worthy successor, it’s an acceptable compromise to everyone._

_Mariana Prince helped me set this up. She disapproved of my plans to flee Britain, and with hindsight I can see why. I don’t want to deprive the children I’ve taught of anything I can do to help them. On the other hand, I don’t want to spread around word of my time traveling to anyone who doesn’t already do it. This way, I can teach many children, and teach the ones I’ve committed to._

_That includes your sons, Mr. Black. I will be happy to visit you at Grimmauld Place as soon as possible and discuss how my tutoring is going to continue. That is, if you want it to. I realize that by not accepting sanctuary with you, I may have forfeited my chance at seeing Sirius and Regulus again. I do hope that’s not the case._

_Awaiting your response,_   
_Harry Evanson._

Orion put the letter down on the table with a shaking hand that he thought contained a great deal of self-control, and closed his eyes. Well, he supposed this was only to be expected. Harry didn’t want to oppose the Minister or Grindelwald, and Prince had made the first claim to him. Orion wouldn’t get what he wanted by holding out sanctuary and hoping it was accepted.

But there were other things he could do.

*

“Be polite.”

It was the only advice that Mariana had given Harry about dealing with this Professor Aurelius Greyhand, and Dumbledore and Grindelwald hadn’t been forthcoming, either. He took a deep breath and stepped into the wide classroom that he couldn’t ever remember visiting in his own timeline. Perhaps it had been used for something else there.

There was a tall, broad man sitting behind the desk, who stared at Harry through a face that resembled Mad-Eye Moody’s. Well, there was no magical eye, and he had his own nose, but his cheeks were crossed and crisscrossed with writhing scars. Greyhand’s left eye was sunken in a pit so deep that Harry was surprised he could see. His left hand was a mere claw that looked as if some disease had bent it. But he had long, pure white hair, longer than Harry remembered Dumbledore’s being, and he rose to his feet with no sign of strain or agony.

“You’re the latest person Albus is trying to pawn off on me as successor?” The man eyed him and snorted. “You’re a _child_.”

“One who’s been through a war,” Harry said, and then stopped and waited. He would probably say something rude if he kept going much longer.

Greyhand stepped around the desk and studied Harry for a second. It was probably meant to take Harry off-guard, but Harry was watching his wand hand, and saw the moment when he whipped out a long shaft that looked like it was made of ebony and fired off a curse.

Harry took a step back to avoid it, raised a shield, and then conjured water to pour down from the ceiling. Greyhand was already moving, though, and this time, the Bone-Breaking Curse was what streamed towards Harry.

_So much for being polite, _Harry thought, and sacrificed his shield whirling it into the path of the curse; that one was notorious for shattering everything that it hit. At least his shield fizzled out and took the Bone-Breaker with it. Greyhand blinked for a second, and Harry froze the water on the floor and conjured skates for his own feet.

Greyhand didn’t try to move out over the ice, instead turning carefully in place to keep Harry in view as Harry shot towards him in a wide curve. His mouth was relaxed, his face shining with pleasure. Not approval, Harry thought, not yet. But probably as close as he could come to it on this short acquaintance.

Greyhand waited until Harry was almost to him—and, he would think, committed—before he cast his next curse. This one would turn Harry’s knees backwards and probably hurt him even more than usual with how fast he was skating.

At least, it would have if Harry had ever intended to let it hit. He spun neatly to the side and spread his legs wide, so the curse flew through them and hit the ice, and then lashed out with his fist as he slid past Greyhand.

The old man staggered a little, and then raised his hand to his face. A trickle of blood was sliding out of his nose, and he stared at it for a second as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Harry, meanwhile, had ended up in the far corner of the office with another shield in front of him and his skates lightly braced for the next time he needed to use them.

Greyhand blinked once and lowered his hand. “You would use Muggle methods in the middle of a duel?” he asked.

Harry shrugged. He wasn’t going to say anything, but Greyhand really seemed to have paused, instead of trying to use the words to lull Harry into dropping his guard, so Harry finally replied, “The important thing isn’t fairness or acting like a wizard.”

“Then tell me what it is.”

“Survival.”

Greyhand nodded and seemed as if he would say something else, but then launched a curse at foot level instead. Harry didn’t recognize this one, a brilliant white and shaped like the lightning bolt that had once been on his own forehead. He took a swift dancing step to the side, but the curse hit his shield, dissipated it, and kept going.

Harry wasn’t there anymore, though. He skated to the side, bent over, and then cast a hex above Greyhand’s head. Greyhand sidestepped it, looking faintly contemptuous.

At least until the shelf behind him collapsed, toppling books onto his head.

Harry watched for a minute more or so, to make sure that Greyhand wouldn’t be getting back up any time soon, and then Vanished the skates and the ice. He strolled towards Greyhand, another shield hovering on the tip of his wand like a firefly. It would grow to enormous size the minute he needed it.

Greyhand groaned and shrugged the books off his head. For a moment, he rubbed the contusion on the side of his temple. Then he glanced up, met Harry’s eyes, and grinned.

“You’ll do,” he said. “I don’t know where you’ve been hiding all these years, but you’re the answer to such prayers as I can bring myself to speak.” He glanced down at what seemed to be an enormous bruise forming on his hip, and nodded. “Where _did _you train?”

“In a different place, a _very _different place.” Harry sighed and holstered the Elder Wand, which throbbed in disappointment in his hand. It wanted to be used to hurt Greyhand some more. Harry ignored it. “Where people didn’t think I should be excused from fighting a war on account of my youth, and then thought I should become an Auror.”

“Then teaching should be easy.”

Harry snorted breathlessly and shook his head. “I’ve taught before, even though it was just a group of other students because our Defense instructor at the time was useless. The questions and the demands about why they can’t get a spell right the first time and the sneers behind my back at how I could do this when I wasn’t ‘perfect’ myself made me almost prefer battle.”

Greyhand surveyed him. “Well, I must say that you’re a better candidate than I expected them to send me. But I’ll still want to see how you do the job. I’ll stay around for a month or two after term begins, sit in the back of the class and see you how you handle it.”

Harry snorted again. “And when the students appeal to you instead of me, or try to use us against each other?”

Greyhand’s sunken eyes were bright. “It’ll be an exciting challenge for you.”

Harry reached the point where he couldn’t help but laugh, and held out his hand. Greyhand clasped it in a less-than-crushing grip, and nodded. “Let’s look at your classroom and the storage places for your books and clothes. The quarters aren’t large, but they’re still better-positioned than some of the others…”

*

“Did you hear that they have a new Defense professor at Hogwarts?”

Mariana glanced up with a smile that she needed no effort to make pleasant. “Is that so? They finally found someone who could satisfy old Greyhand?”

“Yes.” Seneca was frowning at the paper, which only increased Mariana’s cheer. “Last name is Evanson. I’ve never heard of his family. Can you believe they would bring in someone who’s a Mudblood? Half-blood at best.”

“It’s strange,” Mariana said placidly, and looked across the table at Severus. “Severus, hold your fork less like a knife, please, and make sure that you place small bites in your mouth.”

Her grandson scowled at her. Mariana just raised an eyebrow. Good manners were something that didn’t matter just to pure-bloods or people with the last name “Prince,” which meant she was going to make sure Severus learned them.

Severus stabbed moodily at the piece of chicken in front of him with his fork, but at least it was stabbing, not cutting. Mariana nodded. She knew he longed to say something about who Harry Evanson really was, but he knew it was less than wise in front of his grandfather.

“The whole world’s going to wrack and ruin, with Mudbloods as Hogwarts professors,” Seneca complained, and tossed the paper aside. He ignored the byplay with Severus. Manners were one of those things he left it up to Mariana to teach, now that Severus was at an age where he should know them. “What do you think they’ll do next, let them into the Wizengamot?”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Mariana said, although actually she would be. The Wizengamot was one of the most closed-minded, and closed, institutions in the wizarding world. Even Muggleborn Aurors who had risen high in the ranks had to have pure-blood “chaperones” to accompany them when they went into the courtroom to testify.

“I suppose we can always fight back against it.” Seneca grunted, and then focused on her. Mariana sat up a little straighter in her chair, feeling one of those old sensations of fear drift over her. She hadn’t feared her husband since she had learned to Memory Charm him, but that gaze still brought memories breaking into her mind like slabs of ice.

“I was thinking that we should have another child,” Seneca began.

Mariana didn’t have to fake the dropping of her jaw or the widening of her eyes. This was something she’d never have thought of. “Beg pardon?” she croaked, and then managed to shake her head and sit up straighter. “We have—enough to do with raising Severus, I would have thought. And another child could make competition for him.”

“We can always do more.” Seneca surveyed her with a narrow gaze. “Now that Severus is older. And it’s precisely because of Severus that I wish to have another child.”

Mariana glanced at Severus, but although he sometimes had private conversations with his grandfather, there was no indication that he had known about this. His eyes were wide with astonishment—and the beginnings of a temper tantrum, Mariana thought.

“Because of him?” Mariana had to clear her throat before she could finish that little sentence.

Seneca nodded sharply. “Discussion of that Mudblood professor reminded me. There’s every chance that Severus will be pushed to marry a Mudblood when he’s older, to show that he’s not ‘old-fashioned’ or to please the Ministry or some such nonsense. Or he might fall in love with one on his own, that’s the kind of ridiculous thing that happens these days.”

“Yes?” Mariana said faintly, still not sure where Seneca was going with this.

“It’s imperative that we have a daughter who can provide an alternative for him.”

“You’re…talking about having Severus marry his _aunt_?”

“I’m not doing it,” Severus said, in so firm a voice that Mariana jumped a little. She had almost forgotten she was there, her brain was whirling so hard with Seneca’s horrible idea.

“You will do what we tell you, sir.” Seneca didn’t bother looking at Severus. He was concentrating on her instead. “And I know that we are both skilled enough in magic to make sure that no Squibs result, either from your pregnancy or from the eventual marriage.”

“I won’t do it,” Mariana whispered. “You’re—have you forgotten the example of the Gaunts? How they went mad as they interbred?”

“They didn’t have the magic to cleanse their blood and keep it from affecting their magic.” Seneca flicked his fingers as if dusting them off. “I know that we do. And I will have a _ good _marriage for Severus. One that produces Prince children, one that keeps the blood pure.”

Mariana shook her head. “I will not bear such a child. I will not use my magic in the service of…so horrible a project.”

“It is _inevitable_, Mariana.” Seneca bent towards her, his eyes shining in a feral way that caught her attention. Yes, he had sometimes looked like this when he most frightened her in the past, before she had learned to stand up to him, but there was still something _off _about it. “Do you not see? To preserve purity, we have a limited number of choices. This is the best one.”

“You didn’t care so much about preserving purity even three weeks ago. Then you were talking about choosing Severus’s spouse based on her political power!”

“I want to marry someone different,” Severus said loudly. “All the little girls you introduced me to are stupid.”

Again, Seneca ignored him. “This is the only way, Mariana. Mudbloods everywhere, and who can say that some pure-blood girl who gets introduced to us won’t have a Muggle somewhere back in her family tree, or some agenda to integrate Muggles into our world? _We _need to have control of her, and she needs to be a true Prince!”

He was almost ranting now, but in a quiet, compressed voice, which wasn’t like him either. Mariana Stunned him with her wand pointed at him beneath the table.

“Grandmama? What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know, darling.” Mariana stood up and circled around the table. “But you can be sure that I’m going to find out.” She trussed Seneca and then revived him. The Legilimency she needed to perform wouldn’t work if he was unconscious.

Seneca opened his eyes and started talking again about blood purity. Mariana dipped into his mind without paying attention to the words.

His mind was a _mess. _Shards of memories overlapped each other like books tipped off a shelf. Mariana probed further and further, and discovered drifting pieces and shreds, all revolving around the idea of blood purity that had been planted in the middle of his thoughts. The only glimpse she could catch was of a hooded figure who had pointed a wand at Seneca next to a grimy wall that could have been in Knockturn Alley.

Or almost anywhere else, for that matter.

Mariana hissed and sat back on her heels. She couldn’t just _Obliviate _Seneca and have done with it this time. His memories were too scrambled. He might forget his obsession with incest, but not with blood purity, and his memories would either settle to revolve around that planted idea again or drive him mad and then catatonic as they scattered further and further.

Her first thought was Harry, but as far as she knew, he had no expertise in the Mind Arts. There was only one person she knew who did.

Knew _of. _And the tentative connection they shared was no reason to think that he would help her.

But she had little other choice. This was someone who had attempted to manipulate Seneca to use his position as grandfather of the Boy-Who-Lived to promote blood purity. Mariana was sure of it.

And so, she Stunned Seneca one more time to make sure he would stay unconscious, hugged Severus and reassured him again that he would marry no one he didn’t want to marry, and went into her study to write a letter to Orion Black.


	16. A Lightning Bolt

Harry sighed as he came out of his Apparition near Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, in a back corner of a street where Muggles were extremely unlikely to see anything. He hadn’t really wanted to come, but Mariana had written to him about what had happened to Seneca, and where she was seeking help.

And if Harry’s presence meant Severus could get his grandfather back…

Well. No one should lose a grandparent to that kind of mental rape, even if they didn’t like their grandparent very much.

Harry strode up to the door and knocked. It opened at once, and Black smiled at him, his eyes raking and up down Harry’s body. “I see your position at Hogwarts has already begun to pay you more than your position at the shop did.”

“Actually, these are a pair of Professor Greyhand’s robes that I’ve Transfigured,” Harry said, and ignored the _thing _near a pout that Black gave him. “Are Mariana and her family here already?” He stepped into the entrance hall and tried to ignore the memories crowding at him from another world.

Black started to answer, but there was a loud squeal and a sound of feet skidding on wood and tile, and Sirius’s voice shouted, “Mr. Harry! You’re _here_!” A second later, a bullet of flesh launched himself straight at Harry’s stomach. It was a good thing that Harry had his back against the wall, or he might easily have fallen.

“Sirius and Regulus have missed you,” Black said in a bland voice that did nothing about the amusement in his eyes.

“We _missed _you, Mr. Harry,” Sirius declared, tilting his head back so that Harry had to meet his eyes directly. “Don’t go away again, all right?’

“I’ll try,” Harry said, and took Sirius’s hand to get him to let go of the embrace. “You didn’t answer me about where the Princes were, Black.”

“In the kitchen,” Black said, and turned to lead the way down the stairs. Harry followed with Sirius chattering away to him so fast that Harry didn’t understand most of what he was talking about. Harry tried to nod and smile and answer as best he could, but he suspected it might be hopeless.

“What’s wrong with Seneca?” Harry asked Black’s back when Sirius paused for breath. “And why did she come to you?”

“I was under the impression that Mrs. Prince had described it well in her letter to you.” Black, infuriatingly, didn’t even turn around to face Harry, just walking forwards with grave, heron-like steps.

“’Splained what?” Sirius asked, hoping up and down. “Father, can I have a biscuit? Harry, can you pick me up? Can I have a biscuit _and _a norange?”

“Assume that she hasn’t. You like to assume the worst of other people anyway, so that should be natural to you,” Harry shot at Black, while he scooped Sirius off the stairs. Sirius sighed in ecstasy and buried his head in Harry’s robes.

“So prejudiced, Harry.” Black stopped at the bottom of the steps, but only moved out of the way of Harry and Sirius and watched as if he wanted to be sure that they got down safely. “I know that she explained that there was manipulation of Mr. Prince’s mind involved.” For a moment, his eyes traveled over Sirius, but then he must have decided that he had the right to talk about such things in front of his son. He looked back at Harry.

Harry sighed. The desire in those eyes was the same as it had always been: the desire for power, to control other people. He turned away and set Sirius on the floor, taking his hand when he protested. “Come on, it’s just a short walk to the kitchen.”

“Are you listening to me, Harry?”

“Enough to know that you’re continuing to call me by my first name, when I’ve never given you that permission.” Harry opened the kitchen door and stepped inside, smiling at Severus and nodding to Mariana. Seneca was sprawled in a chair next to her, Stunned by the look of his slack face.

“Thank you for coming, Harry. I would be happier with someone nearby that I can trust to take care of Severus while we take care of Seneca.” Mariana was smiling as she leaned across the table to shake his hand, but her body was tense. Harry smiled back and wondered what was the main source of the tension. Did she love Seneca, even if a small amount? Or was she worried that she would get blamed if he died or had to be put in St. Mungo’s?

Or maybe worried that if someone was willing to do this to get to Severus, they might do it to her next. From the worried look she gave Severus when he climbed on a chair to be closer to Harry, he thought it was probably the last.

“Sit down so I can sit on you,” Severus told Harry.

“_I _want to sit on him!” Sirius said, scowling up at Severus from his position near Harry.

Harry refrained from rolling his eyes, but it was difficult. At least Regulus wasn’t here to add to the confusion. “No one is going to be sitting on me because I’m going to stand,” he said, and ignored two pouts that affected him a lot more than Black’s. He turned to look at their host, reluctantly. “I had no idea you were such a talented Legilimens, Black.”

Black shrugged a little and drew out the chair across from Seneca so he could sit down. His wand was in his hand, but pointed away from all of them, just rolling in small flourishes as Black turned it. “Each member of my family tends to specialize in a certain form of magic. I had to try a few before I found the Mind Arts. I haven’t practiced much in the last few years as I’ve been raising Sirius and Regulus, but—”

“Then can you be sure this is going to work?” Mariana interrupted, her face taut.

Black gave her an indulgent smile. “I was a private specialist at one point, Mrs. Prince. St. Mungo’s would have hired me if I could have stood some of their rules.” He turned back to Seneca, seeming to study the slack lines of his face as if they were writing in a special language. “Of course, you haven’t told me what you want.”

“Want?”

Mariana’s face was so strained that Severus started to frown. Harry reached out and gathered him up. He intended to take him out of the kitchen anyway for the healing, and Sirius if he would come.

“Do you want his mind rebuilt to what it was before, with memories of the last few weeks gone?” Black asked. “Do you want a less impressive restructuring than that, which will leave him some of the memories but also means some of the pure-blood obsession will linger? Do you want him to be a completely different person with a completely different personality? I can do any of those.”

Harry jerked his head back. “I think I understand why you couldn’t work at St. Mungo’s.”

Black smiled at him as if he had given him a compliment. Harry shook his head. “I’ll take Severus and Sirius out.”

Sirius decided to be stubborn just then, and folded his arms. “No! I wanna see what happens!”

“You’re too young,” Harry said, and he didn’t care if his voice was harsh, or that Sirius flinched a little and then looked up at him with his lip sticking out. He didn’t want the children to have to listen to talk about rebuilding Seneca’s mind and maybe making him into an entirely different person.

If he was honest, he didn’t want to listen to it much himself, either.

“If my son wants to stay, he should be able to stay,” Black said, a moment after Mariana’s, “I wish Severus removed.”

Severus squirmed to be put down, then walked around the table and clutched Harry’s hand. Harry sighed and started to release his hold on Sirius, but just then, Severus said, “That’s fine with me, Grandmama. I’ll get to spend more time with Mr. Harry.” And then he stuck his tongue out at Sirius, probably thinking he was behind Harry’s leg and away from the notice of an adult. Harry caught his eye, though, and frowned mightily.

Severus looked a little chastened, but Sirius immediately said, “I wanna come with you!”

“But we’re leaving the room,” Harry said. “You wanted to stay.”

Sirius paused. Then he said, “Now I wanna come with you.”

“Please do not use such undignified language, Sirius,” Black said in a distracted voice. His eyes were locked on Seneca’s, and Harry didn’t want to imagine what he was seeing. He gripped both children’s hands and nodded to the other adults.

“If you’ll excuse us, I’ll take them to the nursery. We can find your little brother, Sirius. Is Regulus there?”

“Yeah,” Sirius said, puffing his chest out and looking proud that he knew something Severus didn’t. “Come on, Mr. Harry. And you can come, too.”

Severus gave Harry a long-suffering glance that was so familiar, Harry had to cough to make sure he didn’t start laughing. He clasped both of them by the hand and went upstairs.

Regulus was in the nursery, and he wanted to watch Harry do spells. So did Severus and Sirius, although from the longing way Severus watched Harry’s wand, he would have liked to take it and do the spells himself.

They would hide his skills in front of the “normal” children for now, though. Harry kept Severus’s eye and managed to wink, making it a secret between them, and after that, Severus held his head up a little more and smiled.

What was going to happen in the kitchen, happened. It wasn’t as though Harry was afraid someone wouldn’t be by to tell him about it later. He suspected everyone would get more than their fill of Seneca’s mind.

*

“A reasonable compromise, I think,” Black murmured, spinning his wand between his fingers. He hadn’t looked away from Seneca once since Harry had left the room. “To rebuild his mind but remove his memories and plant some false ones connected to being ill. Do you think you _can _make him believe that he was ill for three weeks, Mrs. Prince?”

Mariana nodded, realized he still wasn’t looking at her, and cleared her throat. “Yes. He was subject to a condition in his childhood that sometimes caused him long bouts of weakness. He hasn’t had an attack in years, but I can represent to him that the stress at the Ministry triggered another one.” She hesitated. “And you can really remove the pure-blood obsession that our enemy instituted?”

“Do you want him to be rid of it? The enemy might try to add something else to his mind.”

“That’s true. And I don’t know who the enemy is.” Mariana stared at her clasped hands for a moment, thoughts dancing furiously. “Could you try to focus on the memory of when it was instilled in him, to locate more about the enemy’s identity than I was able to?”

“I can try. Although a hooded figure somewhere in Knockturn Alley, as the first glimpse hinted at, may be impossible to identify more closely.”

“I know. I simply ask you to try.”

“Very well.” Black shifted his position a little and stretched his arms as if he suspected he wouldn’t be able to do it once he was in the middle of Seneca’s mind. Then he glanced at her. “And you didn’t give me a clear answer about the pure-blood obsession.”

“Can you leave an echo and make our enemy think the implantation of the idea partially failed? I am unwilling to leave more than that. The idea that Severus would have to marry his own aunt is…disgusting.”

“I agree.” There was a spasm crossing Black’s face that surprised Mariana, considering he had married his second cousin. Then again, that marriage had been by no account a happy one; he certainly hadn’t tried to take revenge on Harry for apparently exposing his wife as a potential murderer. “I will do that.”

“And the payment?”

“We’ll call Harry back into the room when it’s time to discuss that.”

Mariana lifted an eyebrow. “I will tell you one thing for free.” She waited, and Black gestured for her to go on, eyes alight with curiosity. “You would have more luck with Harry if you thought of him as a person instead of a resource.”

“I respect your advice,” Black said, his voice a little more brisk. He faced Seneca and lifted his wand, moving it carefully in a few shapes that resembled the outlines of mountains and waterfalls Mariana had seen once on a scroll in a museum. Then he whispered, “_Legilimens_,” and slumped a little in his own chair, nearly imitating Seneca as he vanished into her husband’s mind.

Mariana wrapped her hands in each other, and waited.

*

He had to admire the work of the other Legilimens who had been in Prince’s mind before him. In an extremely limited way.

That Legilimens had bent and warped Prince’s thoughts to follow the goal of blood purity above all else, and to concentrate on his own family, so that he wouldn’t become a potentially out-of-control Abraxan in the Wizengamot or Ministry. However, he hadn’t stitched the mind back together after he warped it. It was no wonder bits and pieces of it were blowing off and away, or that Seneca had revealed the fellow’s work by abruptly ordering his wife to produce another child as a bride for the Boy-Who-Lived.

As he slowly navigated the maelstrom, seeking the foundational structures that he would need to renew, Orion also sought evidence that the hurried warping had been purposeful. Perhaps he had wanted Prince to collapse and distract his wife from other matters, or draw unwanted attention to the Boy-Who-Lived’s grandparents. Perhaps he had even meant to try for custody if Severus Prince’s grandfather was revealed to be unfit.

However, the more Orion found the source of the warping—thoughts shaved like stone from the structures of Prince’s mind—the more he doubted it. No, this had been more like an attack of opportunity, which suggested the target was Prince himself, and the plan short-term, not long-term.

Orion pulled himself back to the memory of the Legilimens in the alley, and stared long and hard at the drape of the hood and the cloak. It was possible that he might know this man, after all, given that he knew a number of practitioners of the Mind Arts in Britain.

But although the slight tilt of the head and one flourish of the wand was somewhat familiar, they told him no name. For all Orion knew, they might have meant only that they were trained by the same master.

Orion ended up shaking his head and turning back to the center of Prince’s mind and the maelstrom whirling around it. He would need to build up a solid core again, something to replace the blood purity idea. He carefully and delicately created his own shavings from Prince’s thoughts: beliefs about blood purity, satisfaction in his own importance, ambitions to influence the future of the wizarding world. He molded them together and established them in the center of Prince’s mindscape.

Once he did, some of the memories from the last three weeks came blowing over and attached themselves. Orion nodded. He had learned from the wizard who tutored him in Legilimency that this kind of rebuilding worked best when it acted with or could at least imitate the natural processes of the injured patient’s mind.

He did, however, add a few kernels of his own to the stone at the center of Prince’s thoughts now. One of them was about treating his wife and grandson better. The state of the Prince marriage was common gossip among pure-bloods. There was no reason for it to go back to being that way; let others think Prince had suffered so severely from his attack of “illness” that he had changed his mind on his own.

And he also wove in a thread of consideration for a man who was powerful and skilled at dueling and connected to his grandson. That thread would remain quiet in Prince’s mind until it had a chance to attach to either Harry or Orion himself. It would depend on which of them triggered it first.

Orion didn’t think it mattered which of them it was. But maybe Harry would thank him for this.

Finally, he opened his eyes and stretched the muscles he had known would be sore. Part of it was the effort of not moving for close to two hours, as he saw with a glance at the clock, but even more of it was just the effort of concentrating so intensely and channeling his magic in ways he hadn’t done in years.

“He’ll be all right?” Mrs. Prince whispered.

Orion nodded. “I was able to attach some of his memories. You might want to tell him that someone cursed him, and that was what triggered the attack of illness.”

Mrs. Prince sighed. “Thank you. I won’t pretend that I love my husband greatly, but it would cause inconvenient questions if Severus’s grandfather died right now.

Orion smiled. Yes, he could understand that mindset, and it might even have attracted him to Mariana Prince if he hadn’t already chosen his own.

“It’s done?” Harry asked, coming back into the kitchen with Regulus asleep in his arms. Sirius and young Prince trailed after him, arguing in low voices over something that looked like a toy mirror sparking with small bolts of lightning.

“Yes.” Orion spoke the simple word and waited, curious as to what Harry’s reaction would be.

Harry let out a deep sigh and turned to look back at the Prince boy first, which said where most of _his _concern was, whether Mariana Prince was his friend or not. He faced forwards again after a moment, and said, “Thank you.”

His smile was sincere and made Orion feel as if one of the lightning bolts around the toy mirror had struck him.

_Shit. _He might be in less control of this situation than he’d thought.


	17. Meet the New Professor

“So this is your new office. I’m amazed that you convinced Professor Greyhand to give it up.”

Harry rose slowly to his feet. It wasn’t every day that he had Gellert Grindelwald walk in through his office door without so much as a knock. He had thought about adding some kind of password to the door, but he didn’t want to hold students out of his office, unlike his quarters, when they would need help. “Can I help you, sir?”

“No need to call me ‘sir,’ Evanson. I feel like we know each other fairly well. We must, right, when the previous war you fought in another timeline must have been against me?”

Harry smiled tightly and said nothing. Honestly, he didn’t want to give Grindelwald any kind of hints about where he had come from or who he’d fought. He’d done enough already. And if he admitted that he hadn’t fought against Grindelwald, then the man’s mind would probably turn in the direction of Voldemort.

“Well!” Grindelwald clapped his hands briskly and sat down in the chair on the other side of Harry’s desk, looking around again. “Yes, handsome indeed. You even got some of the scars and dents out of the walls that I remember the last time I visited Greyhand.”

Harry bit his tongue against the impulse to ask if that had been a recruiting effort. He sat down behind the desk again and shifted some of the paperwork over to the side, signing it. The Ministry was requiring him to take a whole lot of oaths that put protecting the children first, and Harry approved. He just wished it could be done in person and not by paper.

“You’re a cool one, aren’t you?”

“I think it’s warm in here this afternoon, actually.”

Grindelwald laughed and leaned forwards. “Let’s not play games, Mr. Evanson. If that’s still what you want to be called.” Harry stared stolidly at him and didn’t react, and Grindelwald lifted his hands a little. “I want to know more about this other timeline that you came from.”

“It’s destroyed now. It can never be resurrected.”

“That’s not strictly true, depending on what kind of magic you used for the time travel and what bits and pieces of it you want to resurrect. If you want to use such an inelegant term at all.”

Harry met him eye for nose. He wasn’t sure that Grindelwald was a Legilimens, but he wouldn’t take chances. And he knew that Grindelwald wanted him to ask about things like why “resurrection” was an inelegant word, but he simply wouldn’t. He sat there and said nothing and said nothing, and Grindelwald finally threw up his hands in the air with an inarticulate noise of frustration.

“I came because I want answers,” Grindelwald said. “As one of the people affected by your destruction of the timeline, and probably someone most disadvantaged by it, I would say you owe me the answers.”

“_Disadvantaged_,” Harry said, unable to help himself, and got a sly smile in return.

“You have said a few things that intrigue me so much I cannot keep silent.” Grindelwald leaned back and held up one hand. Harry tensed again, thinking that he was about to draw his wand, but instead, wandless sparks leaped from his fingers and fountained up into a shape like a crown, before settling back down into his hand again. “I am still powerful, even _disadvantaged _as I am by the current timeline I would be happy to help you achieve some measure of power, or whatever it is you desire.”

Harry shook his head, a little more centered now. Voldemort hadn’t been able to tempt him with his parents’ resurrection in his first year, and he wouldn’t let this arsehole tempt him now. “Sorry, sir. I have nothing you could possibly give me.”

“That seems like an absolute declaration, and those are rarely wise.” Grindelwald let his hand fall back to his side, his eyes hard and watchful. “Are you sure that you don’t want to change your mind?”

“No.”

“You do want to change it?”

“I want you to admit that you came here to change it for me, and to tell you that I’m immune to the Imperius.”

Grindelwald leaned just a little in his chair. Harry heard the Elder Wand thrum eagerly. It was so interested in a fight that it often noted when someone made a motion that could let them attack more easily before he did. Harry kept his hand on his quill, though, and not the Elder Wand.

“Accusing the Minister’s husband of casting an Unforgivable would give you very few allies,” Grindelwald said. His voice was so low that Harry might have thought it was Parseltongue if he was listening from a distance.

“I’m giving you a bit of advice, not an accusation.” Harry handed Grindelwald a sunny smile and went back to signing paperwork, trying his best to ignore the creeping collar of fear that insisted he shouldn’t take his eyes off the man.

“I will figure you out, Evanson, and then we can talk prices again.”

Harry didn’t bother responding as Grindelwald got up and walked out of the office. Their clashing points-of-view wouldn’t be changed by a single conversation anyway, and he didn’t think he should have to spend more time on this than that.

When he heard the distant shift of Hogwarts’s wards that meant Grindelwald had left through them, he sat back and rubbed his eyes with one hand. The Elder Wand trembled against him and grew still.

_I hate this timeline in lots of ways, _Harry thought. But even as he thought it, he remembered Severus, and Sirius, and Regulus, and Mariana.

He couldn’t hate them. He couldn’t do anything that would cause them not to exist, or to alter into a different form, even assuming that Grindelwald was able to bring him back to his original world, which Harry doubted.

He shook his head, and returned to satisfying the Ministry’s endless appetite for paperwork.

*

“I’m starting to think it was inappropriate to put Evanson in the Defense Against the Dark Arts job.”

Albus sighed. He had just come home from an exhausting incident in which what should have been a simple _Obliviation _after a Muggleborn child’s accidental act of magic had gone horribly wrong and had to involve the Wizengamot, and of course Gellert would be complaining about this. “Why?” he asked, sitting down at the table.

Izzy immediately popped a plate into view with potatoes on it as well as small portions of beef and, on a separate plate, small chunks of cut-up cheese. Albus chuckled to himself as he began to eat. Izzy insisted on balancing his meals that way.

“Because he’s disrespectful. If he can be disrespectful to the Minister’s husband, how well is he going to get along with the other professors at the school? Greyhand won’t be there to shelter him for long.”

Albus concealed his smile behind a forkful of beef for a moment, but Gellert saw it when he lowered the thing. His eyes narrowed. “What’s so funny, Albus?”

“You went there to try and bribe him with something, didn’t you? And you wanted information about the original timeline.”

“That’s not a crime.” Gellert gave him a winsome smile, but he wore another air, a charming, determined one that was part of the reason he had managed to attract so many followers. “If we have a time traveler at our disposal, and mutual agreements not to betray each other, why shouldn’t we learn as much as we could?”

“It would still depend on Mr. Evanson’s desire to share that information. And it seems that he wasn’t forthcoming, was he?”

Gellert shrugged. “He could have been. He might feel more that way if you came with me next time. I had the impression at that little interview with Mariana Prince that he was closer to you than me.”

Albus shook his head and patted his lips with his napkin. “I don’t want to know anything more about the alternate timeline than I do, Gellert. It sounds like it might have been worse for both of us, so why do you want to know about it, anyway?”

“Because I think the little bastard is lying.” Gellert’s charming air cracked and he stood up, prowling back and forth. For a moment, his magic was visible behind him like a flying white cloak, drifting and flowing around his shoulders. “I don’t think for a second that the original timeline he came from was so—confining.”

“You think we were the rulers of the world there. Despite what he said about you being in prison.”

Gellert turned around and walked towards Albus, and then knelt in front of him, taking his hands. Albus shuddered a little. This was the mood of Gellert’s he understood the best and liked the least.

“I think he’s lying,” Gellert repeated softly. “And even if the bit about my being in prison wasn’t a lie, doesn’t that mean that I was in prison for a _grand _crime? That perhaps I was a ruler who was overthrown? Albus, I feel so stifled in this life we have now. If there’s a chance we could be something else…”

“I don’t feel stifled.”

“Then you don’t. But if you love me, then you should be able to see that I do.”

“You could have gone on fighting to the end.” Albus kept his voice as quiet as he could, because he still had nightmares where that had happened. “You could have refused the rehabilitation the Wizengamot offered you, and chosen prison. Then you would be in prison for that ‘grand crime’ you’re insisting probably happened in Evanson’s timeline.”

“You might as well call him Potter, he so obviously is one.” Gellert sat down on the other side of the table, but ignored the plates that popped into existence in front of him. “And I made the choice that would keep me alive, Albus. You _know _that’s different from being happy with all this peace that we have now.”

“What would you have me do?” Albus didn’t bother keeping the exhaustion out of his voice. “I wouldn’t change the timeline back or have you in prison if I could, Gellert.”

“Just speak to Potter. Persuade him. What harm can knowledge do? You know that we can’t bend the timeline back the way it was, but what’s the harm in knowing about it?”

Albus snorted, unable to help himself. “So says the man who claimed that the knowledge about the Deathly Hallows wouldn’t hurt us.”

“It hasn’t hurt _you_.” Gellert’s eyes went to the Elder Wand sticking slightly out of Albus’s pocket, which thrummed at him in warning. Albus had thought at one time that the wand would prefer to go with Gellert, since he had been so focused on conquest, but it had chosen Albus instead, perhaps because he had always had a slight edge on Gellert in magical power. “Come on, Albus, why would you deny me something so simple?”

“Because I don’t think your motivations for asking are innocent.”

Gellert’s wicked smile was bright enough that Albus’s breath caught the way it had, all those years ago, when he had come around a corner in Godric’s Hollow and seen Gellert for the first time. “Why, no, they’re not,” he murmured, and came over to stroke his fingers through Albus’s hair. “But has it occurred to you that we could have both?”

“Have both what?” Albus managed to ignore the way that Gellert was stroking his hair and focused on his narrowed smile instead.

Gellert bent towards him. “We have a time traveler who hasn’t gone insane or tried to run around destroying anything,” Gellert breathed into his ear. “And who hasn’t been executed or tried by the Ministry or gone beyond our reach in some other way. This is the perfect situation to find out if Croaker’s theory of contained time bubbles is true.”

Albus’s whole body flushed with cold, and he pushed himself backwards from the table so abruptly that Gellert had to step smartly to avoid hitting his chin on Albus’s head. “No,” Albus said softly.

“Point out one way in which it’s not a perfect situation.” Gellert had his arms folded and his body cocked a little to the side, the way he used to do when he was about to duel someone.

“Because creating such a time bubble would be _insane. _If it spread and corrupted other corners of the timeline—”

“That’s why I said a _contained _time bubble. We can do this, Albus. You know you’re as curious as I am. And there’ll never be so perfect a setup again.” Gellert’s voice was low and persistent now. “The timeline that he came from still lives in Potter’s blood and bone. We can resurrect it! And we can make sure that it doesn’t spread and destroy the world we’re living in now. Unless we want it to.”

“Gellert.”

“Don’t whisper at me like that. You know it might be better, for all involved. I would bet that in that original timeline, no one expected a baby to defeat a Dark Lord! There was probably less pureblood prejudice if I ended up in prison and you were able to dedicate your attention to something other than being Minister. What if we have happy lives there? What if we have a more equal relationship?”

Albus closed his eyes. It was true that he had to think of Gellert as his hostage for good behavior, and he hated to do it. But then, Gellert could have requested some other means of rehabilitation if this was intolerable for him. Albus could have refused to accept responsibility for him. Their choices had made this timeline what it was as much as Potter had.

“Albus.” Gellert bent over him, breath and then lips gentle on his ear. “You’re curious.”

“Yes.”

“And you know that perhaps Potter was lying, because he didn’t want us to ask him too many questions.”

“Yes.”

“Well, then.” Gellert’s hand massaged and squeezed Albus’s shoulder, and tingles of sharper cold than he’d felt so far raced through him. “Why not do what we need to do? _Looking _doesn’t do anything. We would have to breach the containment spell that separated the time bubble from the rest of the timeline to have any impact on it. But we could do that if it was good enough. If it was—better.”

Albus sighed as a Muggle motor horn seemed to blare in his brain, and stood. “I’m incapable of doing that, Gellert.”

Gellert’s hand froze on his shoulder for a second, and then jerked back. “Because you’re going to pretend that you never believed in the greater good. _I _see.” His face was blank with fury.

“No,” Albus said gently. “Because one of the alarms that the Wizengamot implanted in me if you went too far just went off. That means that Aurors are on their way right now to question you and me.”

Gellert stared at him and slowly stood to his full height. “The _Wizengamot_?”

“Yes. Surely you remember the conditions that they put on your release into my custody, Gellert?” Gellert remained silent, and Albus shook his head. “One of them was that if you started talking about strategies that might mean you’re trying to restart the war again, they would know, and come to question us.”

“How could they possibly _know_? I know there are no Listening Charms in our house.”

“The alarms are in my brain,” Albus said. “They’re set off by my perception of how serious you are and whether you’re trying to violate the terms of your freedom. They know that they couldn’t trust everyone to make the right judgment call if they had Listening Charms and someone with too-rigid standards heard you saying some of the things that you like to say. But they can trust me, and if I think you’re going too far…”

“_I _thought I could trust you, as well.” Gellert’s hair seemed frozen, on the verge of pointing straight up, as he continued to stare at Albus.

“And I thought I could trust you to really have moved on from the war and not still be longing to win.” Albus sighed as Gellert didn’t move. “Gellert, what do you want me to say? I sacrificed enough of my own time and peace to bring the war to a close, and then to convince the Wizengamot that you would be better in my custody than in Azkaban. Of course I’m not going to jeopardize this for your mad experiment.”

“I thought you were more loyal to me as your husband than you were to the Ministry.”

Albus swallowed. “I thought you loved me more than your fantasies of world domination. It seems we were both wrong.”

Gellert stood still enough that Albus missed the slight backwards movement at first. Then he realized Gellert was sliding one foot behind the other, his body twisting slightly towards the window at the far end of the dining room.

“Of course,” Albus said, and couldn’t keep the sadness or the contempt out of his voice. “Run. Make sure that you’ll go straight to prison and never return to me. What do you _think _you’ll get out of this, Gellert?”

“My freedom.” But Gellert stopped and studied him as if he had heard a different kind of bell instead. “Or would you defend me?”

“I can make sure that the Ministry knows you didn’t actually flee and that I don’t think you were serious about making an insane experiment.”

The silence between them crackled. Silent bargains, Albus thought, the kind that perhaps he should have made more carefully when Gellert was first captured and had given his parole.

“Very well,” said Gellert abruptly, and moved over to sit down on the couch nearest the fireplace. “Do not imagine that I will forgive this.”

“That makes two of us,” Albus said, and sat down across from him, and carefully put the Elder Wand on the table between them. It buzzed at him, the way it sometimes had a habit of doing now.

But Albus was far more concerned with the pallor of Gellert’s face, and making sure that he remained motionless until the first Aurors came through the Floo.


	18. Cold Eyes

Albus sat back in his seat as the Auror took a step back from him. The Auror tucked his wand, and the scanning spell on the tip of it that he’d used, away. “Sorry about that, Minister.”

“It was necessary.” Albus coughed, and accepted the glass with the conjured water that another Auror held out, although he knew he would probably offend Izzy by doing that. The scanning spells were _thorough_. They had gone through his brain, emotion by emotion, and teased out the fact that he hadn’t agreed with Gellert, but he had been tempted.

As wrung-out as the experience had made him feel, Albus was grateful that the scanning spells looked for emotions and not memories. Otherwise, they would have learned about Potter the time-traveler.

The Auror who had handed him the water, a young woman with her dark hair bound thickly around her head, looked in Gellert’s direction. He was still undergoing the scanning spell. “I’m not sure that you should stay here alone with him, Minister,” she murmured.

“He wasn’t advocating hurting me.”

“But to put you through such an experience means that he doesn’t care for you.”

Albus smiled, if a little wearily. Many of the people he dealt with on a day-to-day basis had no idea what it was like for him to live with Gellert, and the compromises they made on regularly. “This is the first time that he’s crossed those alarms in the more than a decade since the Wizengamot cast them on me.”

“But what if he does it again?”

“Then the alarms will alert you again.” Albus sat up. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave it there, Auror McDowell.”

The Auror nodded reluctantly, and moved over to confer with the Auror who had just finished scanning Gellert. Gellert sagged on his small stool, exhausted. No one was in a hurry to offer him water, conjured or not.

Albus was glad when Izzy popped in and gave Gellert a glass, glaring impartially at the Aurors. The nearest ones started and stared at her, but then seemed to have decided to ignore her. After all, not many people knew that house-elves could conjure invincible weapons and identify time travelers.

“Is there anything else that you need to do here, Auror Sloan?” Albus asked. He forced his back to straighten, his voice to descend, and his eyes to focus on the highest-ranking Auror present.

“No, I don’t think so.” Kaitlin Sloan gave him a dark-eyed glance, her face quietly unhappy. “If you’re sure that you don’t want someone to stay through the night to monitor the situation, Minister…”

“I’m sure,” Albus said, and winked at her. “As eager as I’m sure some people would be to _monitor _what my husband and I get up to.”

There were giggles, gasps, or coughs from the Aurors around him, depending on their view of the relationship between him and Gellert. Only Sloan didn’t react. She just nodded and turned around, walking towards the Floo. “As you wish, Minister. I’ll see you in the Wizengamot on Monday.”

Albus had never been so glad that it was Friday and the Wizengamot respected Muggle weekend hours except in the event of an emergency. He nodded to the Aurors genially as they vanished through the fire, and ignored the half-pleading look that Auror McDowell sent him.

When the silence returned, he and Gellert both sat in it. Then Gellert cleared his throat. “You never told me about the alarms in your brain.”

“Just as you never told me that you still wanted so badly to conquer the world. In terms of unpleasant unexpected revelations, I think I have the greater burden.”

Gellert twisted his head away. “But you don’t want to do it.”

“I learned better when I was seventeen.” Albus stood. “You told me once that you didn’t understand why I was still in love with you, and that it would have been better if I’d fallen out of it. Is it the same with you, Gellert? Would you be better off if you weren’t in love with me, at least enough to sleep at my side instead of in a prison cell?”

“Leave it, Albus.” Gellert’s voice had an unexpected wash of weariness in it, as deep as the tide. “You’ve made your point. And I made my decisions. I should have known that you would make yourself part of them, too.”

Albus eyed him, then walked towards the bedroom. He did need to sleep, both because of his long day before this, and his weariness with Gellert’s decisions. The thoroughness of the scanning spell the Aurors had performed on his emotions was another reason.

But he found himself lying awake until Gellert came to join him, perhaps a few minutes before midnight. He curled up on his side with a sigh and didn’t reach for Albus.

Albus closed his eyes and breathed nothing.

*

“Welcome, students. I’m Harry Evanson, your new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor.”

Harry was getting intense stares from every corner of the NEWT classroom, but he’d expected that. Greyhand had described it as one of the hardest things to get used to. Harry had nodded along in agreement while mustering an internal shrug. After the way he’d been stared at in his former lifetime, the mere pressure of students’ eyes wouldn’t upset him.

The questions that might go along with that did.

The first student raised his hand before the echoes of Harry’s introduction died away. Harry tipped his head in the student’s direction. He had a pale face and thick dark hair that seemed a little familiar, but until he introduced himself, Harry wouldn’t know why.

“Hibernicus Nott,” he said, with a faint sneer. “Why is someone with a Mudblood last name teaching us?”

“I have a Muggleborn cousin here?” Harry made his face and voice both light. “Wonderful! Can you introduce me?”

Nott stared at him. There were a few uncertain titters up and down the rows of desks, as though students wondered whether he was being serious or not. Harry smiled at them, and then faced Nott and narrowed his eyes. Nott drew back in his seat.

“I am not going to tolerate the use of that word in my classroom,” Harry said softly. Even a few years after Voldemort’s defeat at Severus’s hands, he didn’t know as much as he should about politics in this new timeline, but he hadn’t ever thought they would really find him in the middle of Laocoon’s shop. The thing was, he didn’t care. “I am not going to tolerate the implication that someone is a less capable wizard or witch because of their blood status. Is that clear?”

Nott nodded, but a girl spoke up in the far corner. She had pale hair that reminded Harry of a Malfoy’s, but sharp, dark eyes that didn’t seem like one. “But that’s not true. It’s just fact that Mu-Muggleborns are less capable. Nothing against them, but it’s a fact.”

Harry smiled a little. “What’s your name, miss?”

“Jasmine Parkinson.”

“And what areas of magic would you say Muggleborns are less capable in?”

Parkinson frowned. “Well—all of them. That’s the way it works.” She glanced around, but seemed to place more weight on the nodding heads next to her rather than the wary looks of the students who glimpsed the trap Harry was setting up. “Defense especially, though. Anything that relies on casting powerful magic.”

“And that extends to the children of two Muggleborns? To half-bloods who are the children of Muggleborns?”

“Yes, of course it does.” Parkinson inclined her head. “I still intend to respect you, sir. It’s not your fault that you had parents who were inferior. But you’ll have to live with seeing us surpass you. I hope you don’t mind that?”

“All teachers want to see their students surpass them.” Harry smiled at her. “So let’s see where you stand right now. Come up here and duel me.”

There was a long silence that passed through the room like a wind. Harry supposed that none of their Defense professors had ever wanted to duel them on the first day, before even reading the full roster of names.

Parkinson hesitated. “Me, sir?”

“Of course.” Harry nodded to her. “I know from your name that you’re a pure-blood, and you say that anyone descended from a Muggle or Muggleborn is naturally inferior at Defense. That means that you should be better than I am, no matter how long I’ve been doing this or what I’ve lived through.”

“Doesn’t look like you’ve been doing this for very long,” whispered someone at the back of the classroom who thought he was a wit. Harry didn’t bother looking around, but kept his gaze calmly on Parkinson, who stood up slowly.

“I mean—I meant that we would be better than you _eventually_, sir. Not right now.”

“But people who are half-bloods and the children of Muggleborns can’t cast powerful magic. Therefore, even if I have a little more _skill_ than you right now, I won’t have more _strength. _I can’t hurt you no matter what.”

Harry perhaps would have felt this was a little cruel with a younger student, but Parkinson was either an adult now or less than a year away from being an adult. And she was the one who had decided to voice her ridiculous beliefs.

He would have let her off the hook if she’d backed down. But she couldn’t. She nodded after a second, drew her wand, and tossed her long blonde hair over her shoulder as she stalked up to the front of the classroom.

“To what point of the duel, sir?” she asked, facing him.

“Oh, until one of us takes the other’s wand,” Harry said, and gave her the kind of bright, empty smile that made some of the smarter ones shuffle their chairs back.

Parkinson wasn’t that smart. She nodded, seeming more confident now. She snapped her wand at him. “_Expelliarmus_!”

Her form was good, Harry thought, but he barely felt a tug of power behind the spell, and the Elder Wand didn’t move in his hand at all. That was about what he had expected. Someone who thought that she was already better than her opponent wouldn’t put forth that much strength.

Harry gestured lazily, the Elder Wand low at his side, and said, “_Expelliarmus._” Parkinson’s wand came sailing towards him. Harry caught it and met her gaze. Her eyes were wide and still.

“How?” she whispered.

“I’m strong as well as skilled,” Harry said, and tossed her wand back to her. The Elder Wand buzzed in protest, but it didn’t get a vote.

“You said you weren’t,” she muttered.

Harry was glad to see that the gamble he had taken had paid off, and she wasn’t humiliated. He would have worked past it if she had been, of course. She _couldn’t _be allowed to go on believing what she did. “I never said outright that I was. I said that based on your beliefs, I shouldn’t be strong. And I said that I couldn’t hurt you no matter what.” Harry smiled at Parkinson, wondering if she was some sort of great-aunt to the Pansy he had known. Or the older sister or the replacement, for all he knew. This timeline had changed too much to be sure. “I swore oaths not to hurt a student.”

“What will that mean if we come after you in a duel, sir?” asked the tall girl with the look of a Malfoy.

“I’ll defend myself, but use nothing on you that can’t be eased with a simple spell and a trip to the hospital wing. You are?” Harry tilted his head at her, noting the way she sat up a little straighter. And the “sir.” That hadn’t been there before.

“Gaea Malfoy, sir.”

Harry nodded, and said, “Thank you, Miss Malfoy. At any rate, you should consider something, Miss Parkinson. And everyone else in the class who believes that blood status determines power,” he added over his shoulder. “_Does _it? Or are you hanging onto that because it would make it easier to justify your superiority complexes?”

“I don’t have a superiority complex!”

That was Nott again, with his arms folded. Harry leveled him with a calm gaze. “So you think you have something to learn from professors? Even the ones, like me, who aren’t pure-bloods? Or do you think you could come up here and beat me in a duel?”

Nott settled further back in his chair with his arms still folded. “It’s not fair,” he said. “A duel against a professor. You have more knowledge and skill and strength than we do.”

Harry smiled, which made Nott blink at him. “Then I suppose that your words are true and you don’t have a superiority complex, Mr. Nott,” he said. “You do acknowledge that someone could be better than you at something.”

“Blood matters,” Parkinson interrupted in a quiet, compelling voice. “It means that you can trust the people who have the right kind to speak the truth and be honorable.”

Harry grinned at her. “You’re still angry about losing the duel.”

Parkinson opened her mouth and then closed it. “I object to your tone, sir,” she said, when she finally managed to get the anger she must be struggling against under control.

Harry shrugged. “I used the literal reference to your own words to trick you and make you think you had more of a chance against me than you had. That’s why you’re saying that you can’t trust people like me to tell the truth. But I read the papers, and if I’m not mistaken, the speech that your father gave in the Wiengamot last month did the same thing. He _seemed _to promise greater protection for Muggleborn children who did accidental magic, but he was really only giving people what they wanted to hear. Then his votes did the true speaking for him. Would you consider him dishonorable?”

Parkinson clutched her wand and didn’t answer. Harry turned and surveyed the rest of the class, who at least were watching him in fascination. “What about the rest of you? Do you think anyone who descends from Muggles or Muggleborns is a liar and dishonorable?”

There was shuffling. That was a little more intentional than just asking if they believed themselves superior to people like that, Harry thought. Some of them could agree mindlessly with the other question, but not this one.

“Does it really matter, though?” Gaea Malfoy asked a minute later. She was leaning forwards with an elbow on the desk, frowning at him. “I mean…most of us aren’t going to be in a position to get beaten by a Muggleborn or a half-blood in a duel once we get out of Hogwarts, sir. Not all of us are going to be Aurors.”

“I should bloody well hope not,” Harry said fervently, remembering how he had been Auror-trained and yet had still made a mess of the timeline.

They stared at him, apparently puzzled by his disparaging a career that was fairly prestigious in this wizarding world. Harry coughed and faced Malfoy. “And anyway, you’re using a distraction technique from my question. I asked whether you consider Muggles and Muggleborns and half-bloods dishonorable and liars. Not whether you think they can all defeat you in duels.”

Malfoy’s smile was quick and unexpected. Harry thought she seemed like someone who appreciated other people’s cleverness, which made her different from almost all her family he’d met before. “Very quick, sir.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re quick.” Malfoy settled back in her chair, folding her arms. “But I mean to judge people on an individual basis. Not say that one group is all good or honorable or dishonorable or weak without knowing them.”

“Ah,” Harry said happily. “That means that you would speak up when someone else is saying that Muggleborns are weak and you would defend them, right? And say that they shouldn’t be judged by their blood?”

“Um,” said Malfoy.

“If you wouldn’t, then you’re not there yet,” Harry said. “You’re judging pure-bloods as individuals, but not the rest of the humans in the wizarding world.” He glanced around, and motioned Parkinson to sit down. She did, a fierce blush on her cheeks.

Harry collected their stares and said quietly, “That’s one of the worst ways to try and separate people out, you know. To say that whatever group you favor deserves to all be judged as individuals, and there are good people and bad people among them. But some other group…oh, you can dismiss _them. _You can say that they’re all weak or liars or lazy or just naturally born to be content with less than you have, and it’s true because it is. You claim you don’t need to spend time getting to know them because you already know what they’re like. You let stereotypes take the place of thought. You think of your group as the default and everyone else as radiating out from that default, _not _the default. To be judged.”

“But we don’t have time to get to know everyone,” Parkinson protested.

“Then you should admit that’s true for pure-bloods, too,” Harry said. “The groups just _aren’t that separate. _If you’re going to be thoughtful and nuanced and delicate and considerate when it comes to pure-bloods, you should be the same for everyone.”

“It’ll take a lot of time,” Nott muttered.

“Why, Mr. Nott,” Harry said, his eyebrows lifting. “Is that laziness I hear? Fear of work? I’m afraid that won’t stand you in good stead in my class.”

Nott flushed and stared at him. “No, of course not, sir.”

“Good.” Harry nodded and turned to face the students again. “One goal of this class is to teach you to use your judgment _carefully_. Not hear someone’s last name and dismiss them, the way that many of you did when you heard mine.”

That got a few more blushes, but mostly interested looks. And some gleaming eyes that Harry suspected would result in challenges sooner or later. Especially from Parkinson, who might want to pay him back for embarrassing her.

_Well, that’s fine, _Harry thought, his stomach burning with determination. _If they can see me as an individual, it’s a first step towards seeing Muggleborns and half-bloods as people. _

He would push and shove as hard as he could to get them to give the people they despised that chance. In that way, he would try to make things better before Severus, Sirius, and Regulus arrived at the school. Severus, a half-blood with notoriety hanging over his head, and Sirius and Regulus, who would be expected to act in a certain way by the pure-blood crowd and who certainly wouldn’t be taking that road.

_I want this timeline to be better than the other one. _


	19. A Gift from a Black

“You handled that well, I must say. Although not the way I would have done it.”

Harry gave Professor Greyhand a faint smile as he put down the stack of the first essays he’d assigned on his desk. He’d told the students to think of a “truth” they knew about a Defense spell they’d learned before this year or from their books, and then write an essay explaining why they thought it. He’d heard his students gossiping that they’d got off easy, since this essay required no research.

Harry was looking forward to pointing out the logical mistakes and unfounded assumptions behind those “easy” essays when he started marking them.

“I have to make sure that they know I won’t tolerate blood purism in my classroom.” He stretched and became aware that Greyhand was watching him in a way that made him wary. “I’m not in the mood for another duel today.”

Greyhand chuckled. “I wasn’t looking for a duel, Evanson. I was wondering if that owl was for you or for me.”

Harry turned around, startled. The owl had already been sitting in the office, then, and it flapped its wings and hooted at him angrily when he looked at it. Harry sighed and held out his arm so the owl could glide over. He hadn’t seen it before, but from the size and blackness of the owl’s feathers, he already thought he knew who it was from.

“You don’t look exactly happy to see the thing.”

“No,” Harry admitted as he reached out and unwrapped the letter and the tiny package confined by the string on the owl’s foot. “It’s not the bird’s fault, but an unwanted suitor is sending me this.”

“Why not tell him to go to hell?”

“He has a few kids he hired me as a tutor for, and I wouldn’t get to see them if I rejected him completely. I have told him no, though. He just doesn’t listen.”

“Let me guess, a Black?”

Harry started, and then sighed. “The color of the owl’s feathers gave it away, didn’t it?”

“And the persistence.” Greyhand scratched one of his scars, showing no intention of backing away or leaving the room as he watched Harry open the letter. “Blacks think they’re entitled to anything they want.”

“True enough,” Harry muttered, and frowned down at the letter. It was simpler and more straightforward than he’d learned to associate with Orion Black, which just made him more sure that it was a trap of some kind.

_Dear Harry,_

_I realized the last time you were at my house that you’re right about one thing: I can’t win you or marry you the “traditional” way, by just presenting the advantages of the alliance. I can’t give gifts with strings on them and expect to keep you. So I’ll lay out exactly what this gift is and does, and then you can decide if you want to accept it or not. I hope you will._

_The package contains a key to one of the smaller Black vaults that was brought into the family by an ancestor of mine, who was the last of her line. It contains twenty thousand Galleons. It’s yours. It will be replenished by a thousand Galleons once a year._

_It’s yours. The goblins understand who it’s been given to and why, and they’ll honor whatever name you want to use when you go into the bank._

_I know that you probably think I’m trying to buy you. I’m not. Spend the money on whatever you want, including more of those ridiculous toys that you buy for Sirius and Regulus if you choose. You can even spend all the Galleons, and the replenishment rate won’t change. Ask the goblins if you don’t believe me. They won’t lie for any customer, not about another customer’s money._

_Yours,_   
_Orion._

Harry stared at the letter. He must have made some strangled sound because Greyhand stood up and walked towards him. “What is it? Did Black send some kind of curse on the letter or the package?”

“No. He’s just a complete fucking idiot.”

Greyhand blinked, perhaps because it was the first time he’d heard Harry swear, or perhaps because he thought he never did after seeing the way he interacted with students in the classroom. Harry could have told him that adults were different than teenagers, no matter how exasperating the teenagers were, but he didn’t have the patience. He tossed the letter at Greyhand and paced once around the office.

_What kind of an idiot _is _he? He says that he’s practical and pragmatic and that’s why he wants me in an alliance, because I’m powerful. And then he claims that he’s had some kind of insight and knows he can’t “win” me, but he sends me the key to a Black vault? He’s acting like he’s already won me!_

Harry turned and stared at the black owl, who sat on the back of his chair and hooted at him. Harry drew in his breath to shout, then let it out again in a sigh. No, he couldn’t yell at the bird. It was only doing its task. Animals were sort of in the same class as children for him: worthy of protection, not worthy of being yelled at.

_Although that raven he used last time came pretty close._

“I must say, this is a generous offer. And one that shows his commitment.”

Harry pivoted on his heel to stare at Greyhand. “Oh, come on, not you, too! This is just another means of trying to lead me down the path into his bed.”

“Do you know what it means for a Black to part with money?”

“Nothing, if they can be assured of getting what they want from it,” Harry said harshly, his mind flitting from the way Orion had stared at him to the way Sirius had bought him that Firebolt in the first timeline.

Greyhand paused. “I…all right.”

“So you agree that this is still some other bloody ploy to _buy _me.” Harry glared at the letter and then turned back to the owl as it hooted again. “Look, let me just find some parchment and you can take my rejection.”

“I mean, _traditionally_,” Greyhand stressed as Harry rummaged through his desk for parchment, “the Blacks as a family don’t donate to St. Mungo’s or any funds for orphaned children or anything else that pure-bloods traditionally do to make themselves look good. They don’t care about that.”

“An excellent reason for not donating to orphaned children.”

“Harry.”

Harry glanced over his shoulder. Most of the time, Greyhand just called him Evanson. The older man was coming up to him now, hand out as if to show that he wouldn’t pick up his wand and start a duel. Harry still watched him suspiciously. He could start another duel by trying to strike or trip Harry.

“I _mean_,” Greyhand said softly as he halted at Harry’s shoulder, “that Black is trying to show you, almost the only way he can, that you’re valuable to him. You should believe him when he says no strings come with the gift.”

“How can I? It’s money.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“It’s meant to make me indebted to him and look more favorably on his _suit_.” Harry rolled his eyes. Even in his original timeline, no one had acted like they were—courting him, or whatever the hell Black thought he was doing. Those close to him had known better than to try, and it was the one good thing about his half-blood status putting off the pure-bloods. “No. I’m not going to let him buy me. And what would happen when word of it got out? People would expect me to have the same politics as him. I’m working too hard to establish myself as someone independent.”

“And bloody-minded.”

“That, too.”

“What harm could it do? I know you don’t have a lot of money.”

“No, but what I do have is _mine_. It doesn’t make me indebted to anyone.”

Greyhand considered him with a look that was a lot like some of the students’ had been in the classroom. “Take it. If Black assumes that it’ll make you indebted to him and he’s lying about it having no strings attached, then you can rebuff him. If he’s sincere, then you can accept and use it. You don’t have to _let _yourself feel in debt.”

“It’s about the way I would feel _anyway_,” Harry said, and wrote out a quick refusal to Black. He handed the letter to the owl, who took it eagerly, but when he tried to tie on the package that presumably had the vault key in it, the owl turned its back and flew out the open door of his office.

Harry rolled his eyes and glanced at Greyhand. “Have you ever seen a Black give up in pursuit of something they wanted?”

“No,” Greyhand said cheerfully.

Harry calmed the impatient heat in his chest by reminding himself that he was putting up with Black for Sirius and Regulus’s sake, and that he would be seeing them this weekend. All he had to do was coldly refuse Orion’s insinuations, and he might get the man frustrated enough to leave him alone.

_Face him down and not lose my temper. Yeah, I can do that._

*

“Don’t do it again, Black.”

Mariana put her head cautiously around the corner of the Blacks’ kitchen, the place where they always seemed to meet up these days. Harry was standing with his hands on his hips, staring at Orion, who had such a calm expression on his face that Mariana was immediately sure he was up to something. Blacks simply didn’t _do _calm or stoicism, with the possible exception of Arcturus, Orion’s father.

“I have no need to do it again. You have a vault now. There’s no need to give you another one.”

Harry narrowed his eyes, and the air around him crackled sharp and bright with something in between lightning and frost. Mariana blinked, and glanced down at Severus. Her grandson nodded and stood silent at her side, watching in fascination where some other children would have wanted to interrupt.

“Listen to me,” Harry said softly. The walls and the room nonetheless resounded with his words like a drum resounding with the beats of someone’s hands. He took a step towards Orion, who only stared at him. “You know I’m more powerful than you are.”

“Magically.” Orion’s tongue sounded as if it was having trouble working. “Yes.”

“So.” Harry nodded, and the magic gathered around his hands in such a way that Mariana wouldn’t have been surprised to see him freeze or shock Orion. “You know that you should _leave me alone._”

The walls sang out, this time. Mariana gasped. Was that a compulsion?

But Orion didn’t react with the glazed, blank eyes that Mariana had seen in compelled people or Imperius Curse victims. After a second, she felt silly for thinking that he would. Harry simply wasn’t the kind of person who would do that.

Once, Mariana would have thought that someone who didn’t take advantage of every possible weapon was weak. But Harry wasn’t wrong about his own strength. He just—didn’t need the compulsion.

Although perhaps to put Orion Black off, he would. Orion leaned forwards and whispered, “Why, when you make yourself more desirable with every move?”

Harry closed his eyes and then opened them again. He didn’t react to the words, but said, looking at the doorframe, “Severus, Sirius and Regulus are up in the nursery.”

“They’re _babies_,” Severus said.

“You mean that they don’t act like you.”

“I’m the good one.”

That startled a chuckle out of Harry, and the frightening aura around him vanished. “You still need to go play with them right now. I need to talk with your grandmother about something.”

Severus considered the merits of that request in the solemn way he did everything, and finally he nodded, turned around, and trotted away.

“He only agreed to go because he knows that I’ll tell him everything anyway.” Mariana folded her arms.

“I know.” Harry turned back to stare at Orion, who hadn’t bothered to rise from his chair. Mariana eyed him and wondered if that was confidence or stupidity. From the way he looked at Harry, maybe confidence.

And hunger. Mariana supposed she couldn’t blame Black for that, but she did think that it wasn’t the right approach to Harry. He seemed to get skittish at the thought that someone who wasn’t a child could want him or depend on him for anything.

Then again, did Mariana _want _to encourage Orion Black in any of his attentions to Harry? Probably not.

“You’ll take the vault back,” Harry said, his voice quiet but commanding. Mariana had no trouble, in that moment, in believing that he had fought in wars before he came to Britain, and even that he’d been a general.

“I told you, it’s yours.” Orion spread his hands, staring at Harry with bright grey eyes from behind a fall of shaggy black hair. “You can do whatever you want with it. Leave it to rot—”

“Gold doesn’t rot.”

“There are some Sickles and Knuts in there, too.”

“_Metal _doesn’t,” Harry said, and then cut himself off, probably realizing that he didn’t want to play word games with Orion Black. “I wanted to give you the chance to reclaim the vault without a lot of legal trouble,” he said then, and shifted his stance to one that seemed weary. “Otherwise, I have to go to the goblins. I don’t want to do that.”

“You think they’ll take back the vault? It’s not as if you stole it.”

Mariana broke in then. “What vault are we talking about?”

“The vault that used to belong to Isla Henwise,” Orion said, nodding to her as if to say that she was welcome to the conversation. Mariana wondered if he wanted her help convincing Harry, or just didn’t see a reason not to grant her permission to listen. “She married into my family in the eighteenth century.”

“And what is the reason for you giving this vault to Harry?”

“It has twenty thousand Galleons, and I know that he doesn’t make much money as a professor at Hogwarts, or—at what he was doing before then. This is for him to spend if he wants to.”

Mariana came close to choking on her own spit. That was two times more than the biggest Prince vault held. Granted, the Princes had always had more pride than money, and she was hardly raising Severus in squalor, but still…

“I didn’t think the Blacks gave away money like that,” she said, to say something.

Orion didn’t seem to be gloating over her surprise, though. His eyes had gone back to Harry and were raking him up and down obsessively, while Harry glared at him. “They don’t. Unless the person deserves it.”

“Or you think that would be my price, then?” Harry asked, with a vicious sweetness that Mariana hadn’t known him capable of. “Why think that you can buy me for twenty thousand Galleons and not thirty thousand? Or ten thousand? Why did you decide on _that _price, Black?”

“I would have given you more if I’d thought you would accept it.” Mariana didn’t think she had ever seen Orion Black like this: calm and utterly focused. “And not a Knut less than twenty thousand Galleons, no. Why would you think that I would _not _value someone who tutors my sons, who prevented my wife from bringing down scandal and shame on my family, and made my own divorce possible? Why would I not value someone with enough skill and experience to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts, and do it so successfully?”

Mariana had the impression that Orion would have gone on, but Harry interrupted. “I’ve barely been teaching Defense a week. What do you mean, so successfully?”

“I wrote to Professor Greyhand.”

The air crisped with frost again. Harry took a step forwards, and his hand reached out. Orion gasped a little and raised his own hands. Mariana saw something like a shimmering silvery collar coalescing around his throat.

“Swear to me that you won’t do that again.” Harry’s voice hissed in a way that made Mariana wonder if he spoke Parseltongue, absurd as the supposition was. “Or I will _destroy _your ability to breathe easily for the rest of your life.”

Orion studied him for a moment, then smiled. The silver collar around his neck appeared to squeeze harder, but Orion paid no attention. “No, you won’t.”

“What?” Harry’s face was red, and he looked ready to charge. Mariana hoped he wouldn’t.

“You don’t have the malice to do such a thing.” Orion’s voice was soft and low. “You’re more compassionate than anyone I’ve ever met, more compassionate than any Black. I might not be able to imitate that, but I can admire it. I can try to make sure that such a man remains in my sons’ lives.”

Harry stared at him and then canceled the spell, or whatever he was doing, with an easy snap of his fingers. He leaned against the wall, running his hand through his tangled hair. Mariana was glad to notice that she hadn’t actually drawn her wand, although her fingers had curled hard around it in pure reflex. She let go and swallowed.

“I would do that anyway,” Harry said tiredly. “Come here and tutor Sirius and Regulus, I mean. You don’t need to pay me to do it.”

“And if I wanted some of that compassion extended to me, as well as my sons?”

“You don’t need it,” Harry said, but his voice was a little uncertain. He studied Orion for a moment. Then he shook his head and repeated more confidently, “You don’t need it, and you won’t until you accept that you can’t buy me with gifts.”

For a long moment, Orion narrowed his eyes, and Mariana thought she might require her wand after all. Then Orion nodded. “Fair enough.”

“I’m still going to go to the bank and have the goblins revoke my access to the vault.”

“You are welcome to try.”

Harry stood looking at him suspiciously for a moment more before he nodded and turned to walk down the corridor. Mariana would have turned to watch him go, but Orion was more interesting, especially the thoughtful way that he was massaging the hollow of his throat.

“He could have killed you.”

“Yes, but he didn’t. And he won’t.” Orion stared after Harry. The hunger was clear to Mariana now. “I really do want him for himself, but I don’t know the right gesture or words to convince him of that yet.”

Mariana opened her mouth to tell him about Harry’s connection to the Potters, and then closed it. It wasn’t the right time to tell Orion that yet. Despite what he had said, Mariana didn’t think that he was in a place to hear it without trying to take advantage of it.

*

Severus ran up the corridor as fast as his legs would carry him—it was so frustrating, they were so _short_—and reached the nursery a few seconds ahead of Mr. Harry. Then he collapsed on the floor and reached for a block and pretended he’d been there all along.

He smiled when Mr. Harry came in, and sat up and attended to the lesson that Harry gave Sirius and Regulus, even though it was one that he already knew. But there was no such thing as too much practice when it came to wandless magic, as Grandmother would say.

He’d wanted to linger in the corridor and hear the conversation between the adults, though, and he didn’t understand everything, but he understood _some _things. Mr. Harry didn’t have a lot of money, but he didn’t want the money that Mr. Black had tried to give him. Severus didn’t completely understand why, but it seemed to do with Mr. Harry thinking that that he would then owe Mr. Black a favor.

Severus understood that. But he thought Mr. Harry should take the money and use it as if he _didn’t _owe Mr. Black a favor. Mr. Black had told him to act like that, after all.

And then Mr. Harry could make himself so magnificent and powerful that he could do anything he wanted. And that would be a good thing. He was Severus’s friend and Severus’s teacher. He should be able to be free and respected.

“Severus, are you paying attention?”

“Yes, sorry,” Severus said, and concentrated on making the block hover in front of him. It didn’t work very well, but it took just enough concentration that Mr. Harry turned back to Regulus, and Severus could keep on planning.

Yes, his teacher should be respected.

So now he just had to come up with a plan that would talk Mr. Harry into accepting the money. A _good _plan.

Mr. Harry was really stubborn, though. So it would probably take some time.

Severus nodded, and then started as the block abruptly hopped off the floor and danced around in front of him. Mr. Harry laughed aloud.

“Very good, Severus!”

Severus beamed up at him, and decided that he would work hard and make it the best plan ever. Weeks, if he had to.

Mr. Harry was a good person who deserved it.


	20. Offerings

“Have a good holiday, Professor!”

Harry nodded at the wishes of his students as they filed out of his classroom. Then he stretched his arms over his head and sat down behind the classroom desk with a sigh that was frankly one of exhaustion.

Teaching Hogwarts students wasn’t as bad as Auror training, but it was mentally challenging in a way that Auror training never had been. Students asked him questions, tried to trip him up, reacted with glee to anything they thought was a mistake on his part, demanded his attention, and attempted to find loopholes in a way that Harry was sure even Ron would never have thought of. (Who knew that not telling students _explicitly _that they couldn’t cheat by passing notes back and forth to each other during an exam would result in the students claiming that, “Well, you didn’t _say _we couldn’t do it”?)

Harry was starting to have a lot more respect for professors like Minerva in his original timeline who had rarely lost their tempers.

Someone moved outside his door, and Harry glanced up. He wasn’t leaving Hogwarts permanently during the holiday, partially because he didn’t really have any other place to go. He’d alternate marking with visiting Mariana and Severus, and the Blacks, for the holiday. He’d bought the gifts for the children months ago.

Harry did scowl to himself at the memory. He’d had to use Orion’s money to do it, and had calmed his temper and conscience by reminding himself that if he used the money partially for Regulus and Sirius, he was still benefiting the Black family in a way, and refusing to benefit himself.

That was after the goblins had refused to do _anything._

*

“What do you _mean_, you can’t do anything about it?”

The goblin who had confronted Harry when he went to complain about the Black vault and ask it to be taken out of his name just blinked at him. “Mr. Black gave up all claims on the vault and transferred it to you. We can’t remove it from your name unless you’d like to take all the money out of the bank, and then we’ll close the vault.”

“How am I supposed to keep twenty thousand Galleons in my _drawing room_?”

The goblin gave Harry a look that suggested he could not be further from concerned with that problem. Harry shut his eyes and ran his hand through his hair in frustration, then snorted out. “Okay, fine. I’ll leave the vault intact. But there still has to be some method of transferring it back to Orion Black, doesn’t there?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“What about transferring it back to the Black family?” Harry sat up as the thought came to him. “Putting it in a trust for Sirius and Regulus Black, Orion’s sons?”

The goblin paused and eyed Harry as if he’d finally done something interesting. “That might be possible. If Mr. Black hadn’t signed paperwork relinquishing any claim his family had to the vault, at all, ever.”

“But how can he do that for his sons?”

“As I understand it, they’re currently a few years old, each. It would be an interesting world if wizards allowed children to make their own financial decisions,” the goblin added, in the tone of someone entertaining a hypothetical. “If somewhat chaotic.”

“Ugh,” said Harry, and slumped back in the chair with his hands over his face.

“You are a strange human being. All of the ones I know want money and more money. You’ve had some released to you as a gift, enough to keep you comfortably for many years, and you cannot even be _appreciative_?”

“Not when I know that the man who gave it to me is trying to buy his way into my bed.”

“Ah.” The goblin paused for a second, and Harry thought he must have gone on to another transaction, but when he dropped his hands, the goblin was still looking at him. “I had no idea the going human price for sex was so high.”

Harry stared at him. The goblin blinked back and finally added, “Then you don’t want us to close the vault and give you the Galleons?”

Harry sighed and stood. “No, thank you.” He stalked out of the room and avoided the other goblins as he headed back to the surface. No matter how angry he was at Orion Black, it wouldn’t do to be impolite to the goblins.

He would have gone to Grimmauld Place and yelled at the man if he didn’t suspect that Black would _enjoy _that. Harry rubbed his hand over his eyes. Why was his life so _weird, _even when he went back in time?

*

The memory blew away as Harry realized that the person who had stopped outside his clasroom door was still standing there, and the Elder Wand was trembling in its holster. Harry let his hand rest on it, and heard a soft growling noise.

But a confused one. As if even the Elder Wand didn’t know how to react to whoever was standing in the corridor.

Harry smiled a little and rose. “Miss Malfoy, is that you?” he called. “I told you that I’m not going to give you an exception to the homework, whether it goes against your personal beliefs or not.”

There was a breathless moment when Harry had the distinct feeling that someone wanted to blow through the door in a gust of wind and kill him. The Elder Wand continued to emit that confused noise, but it would fight well enough for him once he was attacked.

Then the figure walked in. The thick cloak that covered it wouldn’t have been out of place in Knockturn Alley. Harry couldn’t see any of its facial features under the deep shadow of the hood, of course.

Harry raised his eyebrows and held still. It was still probably human—probably. It was at least taller than a goblin and smaller than a troll. But it could have been a vampire.

And he really didn’t like the feeling that it confused the Elder Wand at all.

“I have come to make you an offer,” said the figure, in a low, burring voice that Harry was sure was disguised with magic. The Elder Wand’s buzzing changed from sounding confused to sounding upset.

Harry kept his hand a little away from his side, so he wouldn’t warn his enemy by reaching for it immediately, and shrugged. “Some people like to do that, but if I want to buy something, I’ll go to Diagon Alley.”

“Not Knockturn? I’ve heard so many rumors about the unusual Professor _Evanson._”

The man said his name with so much venom that Harry blinked. Then again, perhaps this was a pure-blood who had figured out that Harry was a half-blood. Or someone who just thought he was Muggleborn from his name.

“That doesn’t sound like you want to make me an offer,” he said. “Or at least not one that would benefit anyone but you.”

The figure drew back, and shrouded its hands close to its chest. Harry, watching it, supposed he shouldn’t say it was a man. He couldn’t say for sure. But the figure was at least tall, taller than most women, and Harry decided to think of it as a man for the moment.

“Believe me, what I have to offer would benefit you the most of all.”

Harry suddenly wondered if this was someone who had also figured out his connection to the Potters. He grimaced. _Shit, I never did bind Mariana by her word not to speak to someone about the connection. _He kept his voice neutral with an effort. “I don’t think so. I have a job I like and more friends than I know what to do with. And you can’t offer me money.” _Someone already did that in an irritating fashion._

“What if I spoke of something other than that?”

“I would ask you what you’re speaking of.”

The figure’s shoulders twitched, and now his hands were clasped behind his back. Irritatingly, it reminded Harry of someone without bringing the memory into focus at all. “The chance to travel.”

“I also have the funds to do that if I—”

“_Backwards, _Mr. Evanson. Or sideways. If you will.”

Harry froze. He found himself watching the door of his classroom, waiting for the Aurors to come storming through. That had to be what would happen in a second, or at least the minute he confirmed he was a time traveler, right? Laocoon had been quick enough to try and turn Harry over, and there was really no reason for Dumbledore and Grindelwald to keep him that much of a secret.

_If they try to take me, I’ll fight. _For Severus and Sirius and Regulus and his students, if not himself.

“I am not speaking of _betraying _you,” the figure said, and again there was a weight on that one word Harry didn’t understand. “I am speaking of the chance to make things right. Fix what you broke. It would benefit not only you but me.” He edged a little closer, and Harry drew the Elder Wand because his instincts were clamoring at him to. The figure paused and eased back on one foot. “When you broke time, you also snapped my conception of myself. I want the person I used to be back.”

Harry could feel the anger and fear hammering in him so hard that his head hurt, but his voice sounded steadier than he could believe, even if it also sounded muffled in his own ears, distant and underwater. “Show me your face, and perhaps I’ll accept that.”

The figure laughed, a chuckle twisted into something horrific by the charm his voice was under. “No. I think not. You would waste your time exclaiming and getting angry instead of listening to my proposal. Perhaps I should offer you a word about my power first. Were you not hunting for the man who tampered with Seneca Prince’s mind?”

“Why would I cooperate with a mind-rapist?”

“Did you not cooperate with Albus Dumbledore?” The figure sounded as if he was enjoying himself now. “He is far more of a mind-rapist than I ever was. He has used his Legilimency even on _himself, _so that his thoughts are monitored by the Wizengamot when it comes to his husband. Beware, or he might _betray _you himself someday.”

“If he cast those spells on himself, then he did so with consent,” Harry snapped. “What you did to Prince was beyond the pale.”

The figure sighed. “I had hoped you would cooperate. But why would you do that? It’s not in your nature.” He raised his hand, and one of his fingers appeared to lengthen into a dark wand, which began to glow with the pulse of a blue spell Harry had never seen before. “So I will force you.”

The Elder Wand had stopped its confused noises and sprang out eagerly to battle. Harry didn’t cast a spell until the blue glow reached towards him, though. He was straining his senses, trying to make sure that no students were coming down the corridor or in range of the spell. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, or even shock them, if he could help it.

The blue glow aimed for him, and the figure said in a mocking voice, “No resistance at all? How unlike you, _Potter._”

Harry spun the Elder Wand then, with no thought in his head except to stop the blue glow. He couldn’t shield against it when he didn’t know what it was. He simply willed the Elder Wand to stop it, and—

And it did.

The blue glow slammed into a hardened panel of air that quickly grew crab-like claws and grabbed it. The crab-thing spun around and hit against another glass wall that had sprouted from Harry’s desk. In seconds, the blue glow dimmed, and after a minute, it stopped struggling.

The walls and the crab-claws and the blue light disappeared at the same time. Harry leveled his gaze and the Elder Wand at the cloaked man, not sure what he would try next.

He was standing still, however. Harry didn’t think that stillness was indicative of anything but immense rage. His hand was already twitching, as if the wand that had grown out of his finger wanted to kill Harry as much as use him.

“What was _that_?” His voice hissed and scraped along the edges of Harry’s senses without turning into Parseltongue, the way Harry thought it might.

“Magic.”

The figure trembled as if he would break out in swearing or dueling in a moment. Harry maintained his gaze. He would be happy to help the man decide to leave, if it came to that.

But in the end, the cloaked figure moved a step back and put a hand on the door of his classroom. “I hope that you know I offered you something priceless, something that only I in this forsaken world can give you.”

Harry snored. “Given that it’s the second time I’ve been offered it in a few months, you’re wrong.”

“_Who_?”

“Someone I’m sure you don’t know.”

Harry made his tone patronizing on purpose, and the expected curse came shooting towards him from the end of the cloaked figure’s finger-wand. Harry gestured lazily with the Elder Wand, and yet another screen of light like glass opened in front of him and caught the curse. It folded over the damn thing like a sheet, and both disappeared.

“Someday, I will catch you without that wand.”

Harry snapped his fingers and conjured fire. The flames spread around his hand, and he held it up. He couldn’t make nearly as strong a fireball as he could with the Elder Wand, of course, and he reckoned that he might not be able to dissipate the sort of curse that this bloke seemed fond of casting. But from the way the figure jerked backwards, he didn’t know that, or not for sure.

“_You _should not be capable of something like that.”

“What would you know about my capabilities?” Harry asked, and wriggled his fingers when the cloaked figure didn’t answer. “Now, leave. Shoo.”

The cloaked figure stiffened with what looked like loathing, and Harry was sure that he wanted to say something else, or stay and fight out the duel. Instead, he turned and whisked through the classroom door. Harry waited a few minutes, then went to the door and glanced up and down.

Sure enough, the man was gone. That had been one reason Harry hadn’t pressed him on his identity, or tried to take off the cloak or duel him to a standstill. There was magic going on here that he didn’t know and which might be able to hurt him the way the figure had hurt Severus’s grandfather.

Harry shook his head and shut the door, then went back to more pleasant thoughts, such as how Sirius and Regulus would react to their gifts when they saw them.

*

“Happy Christmas!”

Orion had put up with a lot to have the Christmas that Harry demanded. A tree filled with fairy lights and baubles. Hearing his sons speak with excitement of a mostly Muggle holiday and not scolding them for it. Agreeing that they would have a “special” dinner, which seemed to be mostly sweets, on the twenty-fourth of December.

It was worth it to see the way Harry eyed him every time he thought Orion wasn’t watching, as if expecting him to turn into a snake when Harry looked away.

And it was worth it to see the smile that broke out over Harry’s face as he watched Sirius and Regulus opening the presents he had apparently bought for them, the small enchanted plush cats that wriggled and purred and the simple books and a model of a fairy whose wings whirred and which was so realistic that Orion had opened his mouth to forbid Sirius to keep it before he realized that Harry was the sort of sap who would never buy a live fairy for a child as careless as his elder son.

That smile…

It could have warmed an arctic night. It could have called armies. And Orion could have spent days watching it.

Of course, the moment Harry noticed he had an audience, it flickered and died. Harry glanced away and then smiled as Regulus waved his own practice wand around.

“That’s what you spent the money from the vault on,” Orion murmured, leaning towards Harry.

“Of course I did.” Harry tilted his head upright while his eyes shone with a warning.

“Thank you.”

And now Harry was the one trying to understand him through a stare, but Orion ignored that. Harry had accepted the money and was spending it. And he had provided gifts that Orion’s children genuinely enjoyed.

It had allowed Orion to take care of Harry as he’d wished, and at another remove, to take care of his sons. If Harry thought about it, he would have to guess the answer.

He glanced at Harry as they herded the children towards the table. “Will you stay the night?” he asked softly.

Harry gaped at him.

“I didn’t mean in my room,” Orion added mildly. “We do have plenty of guest rooms, you know.”

“You do not give _up_.” But Harry was smiling fondly down at Regulus, who was clutching at his finger, and the words didn’t have the scorpion sting in their tail that they usually would. “I can’t. I promised that I would spend Christmas Day with the Princes.”

“That wouldn’t preclude you spending the night and leaving early tomorrow.”

“It does, because I still think that you’ll wake up someday and realize this courting is a fantasy.”

“Why?”

“My blood. My politics. Because you could find someone who would serve whatever purpose you have in mind for your second marriage better.”

“But not someone I want more.”

Harry glanced at him with stunned eyes. Orion just nodded, said, “If you have to leave, you have to leave, but let’s get to the table before Sirius eats all the lemon tarts,” and quickened his pace.

Harry might not believe him now. Someday, he would.


	21. Adult Discussions

“So you don’t have any idea who this mysterious figure was?”

“If I did, I would have told you.”

Harry’s voice was mild, but Mariana had to fight back a flinch. They were sitting on the floor of the living room with the enormous tree looming over them, garlanded with silver and green, and a shining glass star charged with a Neverending _Lumos _Charm on top. The fire flickered warmly behind them, and Severus’s snores bubbled in their ears.

But Harry’s eyes still cut through her like the winter wind.

“I’m sorry,” Mariana whispered, and pulled her grandson into her lap. They were having their Christmas without Seneca—a necessity, as he certainly wouldn’t have put up with it. But it was easy to manipulate his mind now, and the house-elves guarded the room with their magic. Mariana couldn’t regret it. Severus had looked as if all his dreams had come true when he’d walked into the drawing room and seen the pile of presents.

Harry sighed a second later. “Not your fault. But yes, I would have told you. I don’t have the slightest guess, except that it’s someone who knows that I’m a time traveler and likes who they were in the other dimension better.”

“And he could have been lying.”

“He might not have been a he.” Harry folded his arms behind his head and lay back on the carpet, staring up at the star. It still startled Mariana sometimes, how casual he could be even though he looked like such a pureblood Potter. “I made the best guesses I could, but that cloak and the enchantments on his face and voice kept me from being sure about anything.”

Mariana nodded. “But he probably was the one who manipulated my husband’s mind.”

“Yes. I think that was a rather weak strike, but then again, I don’t know the first thing about what he wants.”

Mariana licked her lips and concentrated for a second on the warmth of sleeping Severus in her lap, his red flushed face and the way that his hands clutched at her robes. He looked so young. But he was here, and not defenseless.

“Did you tell Black?” she asked, when the sound of the breathing had soothed some of her fears.

“_Black_?” Harry laughed hard enough that Severus stirred in his sleep. Mariana put a hand on Severus’s back, and frowned at Harry. Harry exhaled and rolled his eyes. “Of course not. He would probably decide that he should kill the man and bring me his head as a tribute or something. I want nothing to do with Black.”

“This _figure _could be a danger to his sons.”

All of Harry’s muscles tensed. “I didn’t think of that.”

“Because you were trying so hard to think of nothing but Sirius and Regulus when you were over there?” Mariana made her voice dry, and Harry’s glance darted over to touch her like leaping frogs, then away again.

“Something like that.”

Mariana paused, and tried to feel out the words she wanted to say. This wasn’t the kind of contest she was accustomed to entering. After she had married Seneca, there had been long years where she barely saw anyone outside the family, and then she had lapsed into what she thought of now as her cowardly time, when she was afraid to say or do anything lest Seneca find out about it. The fact that she hadn’t been able to prevent Eileen from running away and marrying a Muggle had been a huge part of that.

But while Harry wasn’t her child, he was her friend, which gave her some sort of a right to do this.

“Do you think you’ll ever want to date or marry him?”

“_Sirius? _I think he’s a little young for me.”

Mariana laughed in spite of herself, which made Severus stir on her lap again. She gathered him still closer, and he shifted his warm weight, but stayed asleep. “I suppose that you really are thinking of the sons and not the father. I meant Orion, of course.”

Harry wrinkled his nose and shook his head. “No.”

“Because of how overbearing he is? Or some other reason?”

“Overbearing, arrogant, thinking he can somehow make me into an honorary pure-blood.” Harry counted off the reasons on his fingers as if he had had the list waiting inside his head, then leaned back with a sigh of exhaustion. “That’s a large part of it.”

“But not the whole.” Mariana was sure of that suddenly, and she stared at Harry, silently willing him to trust her and tell her.

Harry made a chuckling, chuffing noise and shifted his shoulders. “You’ll tell me I’m being an idiot if I tell you the whole.”

“Would you please trust me with this? I promise not to say that.”

“Or think that?”

Mariana shook her head. “I can’t promise that for sure until I hear what it is.”

Harry rolled onto his back and stared at the _Lumos _Charm on the tree again. “I still think that I committed a great crime in breaking the timeline. Oh, some people are happier.” He glanced at her and Severus, and his face softened with an affection that Mariana thought was real. “But how can I know for sure that I made the _Blacks _happier? I can’t. I can’t even know for sure that my attempts to make up for it are going to work.” He sighed. “So I want to help Sirius and Regulus, but getting more deeply involved in their lives isn’t a good idea.”

“And Orion?”

“I wouldn’t make him happy, either.”

“Are you so sure of that?”

“_Yes. _I can’t be what he wants, the perfect, powerful pure-blood spouse.” Harry rolled onto his side and regarded her with an earnestness that made Mariana at least sure that he believed his words, and it wasn’t some excuse. “He thought of me in the nature of an ally at first. I wish he would go back to thinking of me that way.”

Mariana wondered for a moment whether she ought to say it, and then decided she would lose nothing by it, and neither would Harry. “Have you thought at all that his attraction to you might be sincere, and for your _non_-pure-blood qualities?”

Harry stared at her with slightly parted lips, which was his equivalent of a dropped jaw around them. Mariana had become aware long ago of how strictly Harry controlled the expression of his emotions around her and Severus, and it saddened her even as she understood. She often thought that he must have been scolded by someone for expressing himself. “No.”

“But consider it—”

“Consider _what_? He’s always going to think my blood’s inferior, and that’s no basis for a relationship.”

“You’re giving, Harry. You’re good with children. You’re magically powerful. You have such a sincere consideration for the members of the Black family that you won’t accept what Orion is offering _in case _you do them harm. Do you think those are qualities he found in his last spouse? Or even looked for?”

“Of course not. Which means that he won’t value them now.”

Mariana sighed. It seemed she wouldn’t make any headway. “At least think about it,” she said, as a last sop to her own conscience. It wasn’t that she thought Black would make the best partner possible for Harry, but he was there, he was offering, and he could bring Harry the protection and peace that Mariana thought he needed. And she did think that he didn’t consider Harry’s half-blood status an obstacle anymore. Not with the way he looked at him.

But then again, if that was true, Black hardly needed her help. Sooner or later, his sincerity would make itself obvious, and Harry would notice.

Maybe.

_Surely, _Mariana thought, a little uneasy, and then asked for more information about the man whom Harry thought had played with Seneca’s mind. It was just as well to keep a multi-directional watch for the approach of their enemy.

*

“What are you doing, Gellert?”

“Why do you care, Albus?”

Albus sighed and shook his head. “You know that I had no choice but to speak to the Wizengamot about what you were doing,” he murmured as he sat down on the couch that faced his husband’s hunched back. Izzy appeared briefly, glanced between them, and then disappeared again.

“I thought you shared more of my goals.”

“You thought I shared your goal of dominating the wizarding world? You know as well as I do that the last time I thought seriously about that, we were both seventeen.”

Anger had bled into Albus’s voice despite himself, and from the way he turned around and smiled at him, Gellert was happy to hear it. But he said with unwonted gentleness, “Not that. I thought you wanted us to have a happy marriage.”

Albus stared at him. “Within the confines of the law.”

“What does _law_ mean when you bend it so that a time traveler can remain free of the Ministry?” Gellert laughed like a crow. “At least I didn’t endanger the whole of _reality _when I was conducting my war.”

“We already know he changed things,” Albus said, keeping his voice soft and as slow as he could. Whenever they argued with true anger, Gellert won. He was more learned in the ways of rage. “I saw no reason to alter those arrangements when we didn’t even know if he was _done _altering things. And I believe that he would have broken out if we had imprisoned him in a cell.”

Gellert snorted and came over to sit down next to Albus. Then, and only then, he made a rude gesture. “Don’t give me that, _Albie_. It wasn’t considerations of cold practicality or your distrust of how secure Azkaban is that guided you. It was purely compassion and the kind of sentimentality that I thought you got over years ago.”

“I would never wish to get over such.”

“Why not? You certainly did in regards to me.”

Albus snorted back and said nothing. Izzy appeared again, stared hard at them both, and then snapped her fingers and whirled plates into being next to them. Albus eyed his sourly. There was a sandwich with lots of cheese and tomatoes, and he had learned that Izzy made those when she thought he should be refraining from meat, which supposedly made him “angry.”

“Look.” Gellert held up his sandwich. “Meat on mine.”

“Because Izzy knows that you’ll be angry anyway, so she might as well give you that,” Albus retorted, and had the pleasure of seeing Gellert’s look turn sour before he picked up his sandwich and left the room.

Albus went to the table, although Izzy wouldn’t give him a stern look for staying on the couch when she had brought the plate there in the first place, and ate while staring at the wall. His mind roamed through the moment when he had taken custody of Gellert from the Wizengamot. Could he have done something else? Was there some other vow he should have made?

Yet, no matter how much he went over it in his mind, there was nothing that stood out to him as more he could have done.

*

“And you accept the burden that this lays on you, Minister Dumbledore?”

Albus nodded. He was sitting in a cramped chair made of iron in front of half the Wizengamot, the half that traditionally handled the security of Azkaban, the sentencing of prisoners, and the revising of evidence if any new pieces were presented after a trial. “For me, it is a burden that I should have assumed long since.”

“Care to explain that?” said Arcturus Black, his narrow face alight as he leaned forwards.

Albus looked calmly at him. “You know my past with Gellert, Mr. Black. I should have taken care of him long since, and turned him from the path of evil he has proceeded down. This is only fulfilling a duty I laid down when it was not mine to lay down.”

Black sat back in his chair with what was close to a pout. Then again, Albus thought, Blacks and Princes and other pure-bloods who thought themselves superior had been trying to catch him out for all the years he had been Minister.

Albus sometimes felt amusement when he considered that his best defense was simply that he never lied. And then the weariness would come pouring in like a blizzard.

“Explain to us why he would be safer in your custody than in Azkaban,” said Seneca Prince, his arms crossing his chest. _There _was a man who could have been more dangerous than Gellert if he’d had more comparable levels of power, Albus thought. Prince was cold enough to care for nothing save the glory of his family, cold enough to cast out his daughter forever for marrying a Muggle. “Why should we endanger the wizarding world for the sake of your old flame, Minister Dumbledore?”

Albus ignored the tone. “I believe that it would be safer for the wizarding world because Gellert might ultimately break out of Azkaban.”

“No one has done it so far,” said Isabella Shafiq. She was as silent and contained as Prince, but far less cold and far more watchful. There were times that Albus considered her the most dangerous member of the Wizengamot.

“Horatio Prewett,” Albus said.

Annoyance and embarrassment marred most of the faces around him. Albus simply watched. They had agreed to keep the news of that escape from most people in Britain, for the sake of preventing public panic, but certainly everyone here knew of it.

“Prewett was a mistake,” Shafiq snapped.

“If you mean that it was a mistake to put him in Azkaban, I certainly agree.”

“No, I mean that he could—no one would ever be able to repeat what he did with the Dementors,” said Shafiq, but her voice trailed off towards the end, by itself, and she sat back with a thoughtful look on her face.

“I’m afraid that Gellert would be able to,” Albus said. “He isn’t like any other prisoner that we’ve put in Azkaban in historic times, _except _Horatio Prewett. They both know Dark magic, they both have a genius for getting people and creatures to follow them, and they both rage in a way that affects their magic.”

There was silence for a long time around them. Then Prince shook his head and said, “One would think that a former lover is someone able to easily _arouse _rage.” His voice lingered on the word, and he watched Albus with a cruel, knowing amusement. “Why should we place Grindelwald in your custody?”

“Do you think anyone else will be able to control him, when Azkaban is not an option?”

Silence. Albus watched the glances flickered among them, and knew what they were all thinking. Some of them were people who might have followed Gellert, if he had looked nearer to winning. And others were people who had had the opportunity to face Gellert before Albus did—or face him _when _Albus did—and had shied away from the opportunity.

“I am the closest match to him in power,” Albus said quietly. “And I am willing to have safeguards placed on my mind, on my very _thoughts_, to alert the Wizengamot if I am ever swayed towards following him.”

“Those spells are experimental.” Black sounded _concerned_, but Albus suspected it was only because he didn’t want one of his political rivals to become Minister.

Albus shrugged. “I also know and practice Occlumency. You know that one reason the Unspeakables haven’t found someone to test the spells on is because they require a strong wizard who knows Occlumency as well as Legilimency, and there are few of those around.” He carefully didn’t look at Prince, whom he suspected of using Legilimency to hammer into more than one mind and leave more than one drooling patient in St. Mungo’s.

_But needs must. _The thought echoed wearily in his head, joining all the other echoes of that phrase since he had become Minister.

“True enough,” Black muttered, sounding resentful now. “And you are willing to take on this burden?”

“For the duty I should have followed, for the duty I follow now, to prevent the danger that might come from placing Gellert in Azkaban…” Albus drew back his shoulders. “Yes, I am.”

*

Albus sighed as he finished his sandwich and stood up to seek his bed. _His _bed, tonight, probably; Gellert would sleep on the couch or find some other way of expressing his displeasure which would make Albus feel completely alone.

He made his way to the bathroom, and saw through the door of the library that Gellert was indeed on the couch, although sitting up and reading instead of curled up ready for slumber. He stiffened his shoulders and turned his head away when he heard Albus, and Albus shut the door of the bathroom without saying anything.

_You have no compassion for me, _Gellert’s voice echoed in his head.

Albus shook his head wearily as he stripped off his robes. If Gellert had been there the day Albus argued with half the Wizengamot against putting him in Azkaban, then he would have understood better.

There was a _chance _that Gellert might have influenced the Dementors and been able to escape. But not, in Albus’s view, a large one. Gellert had so many awful memories that he might have succumbed to the Dementors’ influence in the way that Horatio Prewett, far more a trickster than a Dark Lord, never had.

No, Albus had done it because he hadn’t wanted Gellert to suffer. And he had made the sacrifice of spells binding his brain to bring the Wizengamot around when they wouldn’t have been convinced otherwise.

_Not that he would want to hear that from me right now, _Albus thought, and lay down, and tried to put all notions of time travel and Dark Lords out of his head.

He fell asleep, and dreamed of both.


	22. The Challenge

“And if you were expecting to face a duelist armed with two wands,” Harry said, pacing back and forth in front of his fifth-year Defense class, “what would you do?”

That made a lot of his students exchange glances that had an edge of panic, but Harry had expected this, and he held still and waited. Finally, a fifth-year student in Ravenclaw with long dark hair raised her hand.

“Miss Chang.” Harry nodded to her and tried to avoid seeing the glimpse of Cho superimposed over her features. This girl, who went by the name Louise, was her own person, considerably less confident than Cho even though she was a great Defense student.

“Um.” Chang bit her lip and settled back in her seat as if Harry was about to let his Patronus charge her. “I don’t think I would expect it. Most people don’t have two wands.”

Harry nodded. “But part of this class is to bring expectations into reality,” he said, and saw her relax. That was a phrase from one of Professor Greyhand’s Defense books, which Harry had kept when he started this class. The Ravenclaws, in particular, reacted well to Harry referring back to the books. “So. Think about it. What would you do?”

Chang shut her eyes and waited for a few seconds. Then she opened them and nodded. “I think I would try to set up an ambush so that I wouldn’t be at such a disadvantage.”

“Good!” Harry said. “Five points to Ravenclaw.”

Chang beamed, then sank lower in her seat as someone scoffed from the other side of the classroom. Harry sighed and turned around, to face the bane of his fifth-year Gryffindor-Ravenclaw Defense classes. “Mr. Potter, you had something to say?”

Aethelred Potter was a sturdy boy with unruly dark hair and blue eyes and twice the swagger that Harry had seen his father display in Snape’s Pensieve. He rested with his arms stretched out along the back of his chair now, and stared straight at Harry even though he sounded like he was speaking to Chang. “Setting up an ambush is dishonorable.”

“Would you rather be dead than dishonored, Mr. Potter?”

Aethelred grinned with only his teeth as he leaned forwards. “Now you’re getting it.”

Harry stared at him and said nothing. His mind was working, but honestly, it wasn’t fear of Aethelred. He didn’t fear someone so self-absorbed that he never looked around to see what anyone else was doing before he made an enemy.

Besides, Aethelred had a powerful family backing him up, but Harry had the Minister for Magic and the family of the Boy-Who-Lived and Orion Black.

Thoughts of Orion made Harry want to grimace, and it was a struggle to keep his voice calm when he replied to Aethelred. “All right, Mr. Potter. Tell us what you would do if you faced someone with two wands.”

“I wouldn’t do anything, because that isn’t real. It’s just a testing scenario that you made up.”

“Really?” Harry flicked the Elder Wand and wordlessly Summoned Aethelred’s wand from his pocket and over to his own hand. “Now you’re facing someone armed with two wands, Mr. Potter. Tell me what you would do.”

Aethelred surged to his feet, but his grin remained on his face, and his voice as he barked, “Give me that back!” sounded feigned.

Harry stared at him again. There was some point here that he wasn’t seeing, some plan going on under the surface. Aethelred wouldn’t have challenged a professor like that on a normal day, Harry knew. He did listen to the way the other professors talked, and none of them thought Aethelred was disrespectful. It was just a struggle to get him to pay attention in class.

Harry briefly felt along the handle of Aethelred’s wand, without taking his eyes from the boy’s face, to see if there was a trap or curse buried in the wood, but it felt normal to him. And the Elder Wand would probably have reacted to it, anyway.

So this had to be something else.

“You still haven’t told me what your strategy is to handle someone with two wands, Mr. Potter,” Harry said, and as usual, tried not to twitch at hearing his own last name come out of his mouth.

Except that it wasn’t his own last name anymore, was it? His own actions had taken that away from him. He kept his eyes locked on Aethelred, and waited for the next move.

“In this case,” Aethelred said, and struck a pose that was probably meant to make him seem heroic, “to challenge them to a duel.”

“Interesting,” Harry said. He was sure that that _was _part of the plan, from the confidence with which Aethelred had said it, but it couldn’t be the ultimate one. “How are you going to conduct a duel without your wand?”

For the first time since the beginning of class, the grin dropped off Aethelred’s face, and the boy stared at him with his eyes narrowed. “You’re going to give it to back to me, of course,” he said, enunciating each word. “Mr. _Evanson._”

The way he spat Harry’s last name seemed filled with genuine hatred, but Harry had no idea why. Aethelred didn’t have the same conceit and pompous arrogance that Harry had had to deflate in some of the other purebloods, and he didn’t seem to care about blood status. It made the tone of this whole encounter even more bizarre.

“When you face this situation in the real world,” Harry said, with a carefully exaggerated sigh, “do you think your opponent is going to give you your wand back just because you ask nicely?” He wriggled the two wands he held at Aethelred. “Come on, Mr. Potter. Tell me what your solution to this problem is.”

Apparently, it was a charge. Aethelred shouted and covered the distance in between them before Harry could blink.

But although he was fast, he wasn’t trained. Harry spun to the side and leveled his leg in the air. Aethelred tripped over it and went sprawling. The class gasped, with a few people hovering on the edge of laughter.

Harry made sure that he kept his wince to himself. The last thing he wanted was to humiliate his students in public; he saved that for the very few there was no other way to teach. But on the other hand, he couldn’t back down now in front of this young man and hope to keep any authority over the others.

“Now, Mr. Potter.” Harry made sure his voice retained the bored tone as Aethelred levered himself back to his feet and stared at the blood dripping from his scraped palm disbelievingly. “Are you going to tell me some solution that will _work_?”

Aethelred stared at him with very hazel eyes. “You’re _dishonorable._”

He breathed it like it was a revelation, but Harry merely shrugged. “Battle can only be honorable when people abide by the rules,” he said. “So far, you haven’t shown that you intend to. First you refuse to answer a question. Then you charge me without declaring the opening of the duel. Are you going to ever answer the question or not?”

Aethelred blinked. “But—you don’t hold to honor with someone dishonorable.”

Harry snorted. “That’s convenient, then. I don’t have to hold to honor with you, either.”

Aethelred’s face went a brilliant red. Harry watched him with the closest to a dispassionate expression that he could. He didn’t want this to happen, he hadn’t wished it on himself, and there was something more than just this student’s desire not to answer the question behind it.

“If I answer the question,” Aethelred finally squeezed out, “will you give me my wand back?”

“Yes,” Harry said. He didn’t ask for any other promises. He was pretty sure he knew what would happen the moment Aethelred had his wand in hand again, and for the boy to be this aggressive around him, maybe it _needed _to happen.

“All right,” Aethelred said, clipped. “I’d raise a Shield Charm first, then try to find cover or help. If I couldn’t do that, I would retreat. Someone who’s skilled with two wands is just too dangerous to take on with no preparation.”

It was a fairly good answer. Harry nodded, tossed him his wand back, and turned to face the class. “So, as you see—”

Aethelred tried to hex him in the back, just as Harry had predicted. Harry sighed as the Stunner spread out over the shield he had raised before he entered the classroom, just as he did every time, and turned back to face Aethelred. His face was an almost unhealthy red now, his hand clenched around his wand as if he couldn’t believe he had failed.

“I suppose,” Harry said quietly, lifting his eyebrows a little, “cursing someone in the back is _not _dishonorable?”

It had made his point better than any kind of scolding he could have given the boy would have done. Aethelred panted, staring at him with hot eyes. Then he jerked his head and charged straight at Harry again.

People squealed, and one of the other Gryffindors used their own wand to move the desks out of the way. Harry simply stepped back and turned the floor beneath Aethelred to ice, as he had in his duel with Greyhand. Aethelred stumbled and went down heavily.

He tried to get back to his feet, but they slid out from under him. Harry just watched in impassive silence. He didn’t need to do anything else unless Aethelred showed that he _was _capable of standing right now. He glanced at the other students and found a few of the Gryffindors as red-faced as Aethelred, but most of the others enthralled by the duel. At least it didn’t seem likely someone would interfere.

Aethelred cursed him quite comprehensively, but with words and not magic. Harry listened for a moment, then said, “Five points from Gryffindor for your language, Mr. Potter.”

This time, Aethelred at least tried, firing a Knee-Reversing Curse at him. Harry deflected it with the shield, and it went into the wall, where it sizzled and made a hole. This time, there were some gasps.

Harry smiled a little. The spell had caused that effect only because the wall had no knees that it could force to bend, but it was interesting to know that some of them could still be concerned for him.

“Fight me—like a man!” Aethelred’s elbows slipped out from under him, and he went down again, hitting his chin sharply on the ice.

“And again I ask you,” Harry said, staring down at his student as he bled from a new place, “is it an honorable _man’s _stance to curse someone in the back?”

Aethelred stared up at him, breathing heavily. Harry waited. This was the point where either Aethelred would realize how much he was embarrassing himself and yield the duel out of sheer mortification, or—

Aethelred whipped his wand around to point at Chang.

_Or he’ll try to take it out on someone else._

Harry had a shield raised between Chang and Aethelred the minute he saw the boy’s wand turn anyway, but any lingering amusement he had went flying out the window when Aethelred snapped, “_Cru_—”

“That is _enough_!”

The Elder Wand’s aura snapped out of Harry’s hand, and absorbed the slight sizzle of the Unforgivable that had managed to emerge from Aethelred’s wand. Harry stalked forwards, banished the ice with another flick, and hauled Aethelred to his feet. Most of the time, he’d have had to use a Lightening Charm, the boy was so sturdy, but right now, Harry could have hauled around Marcus Flint.

“You _pathetic little coward_,” Harry said in a low, deadly tone, focusing on Aethelred’s wide eyes. All his desire not to humiliate the boy who was (somewhat) related to him had flown out the window. “What in the world are you _doing_? Trying to torture someone because they got the right answer and you didn’t—” Harry shook his head, beyond words. “You disgust me. You are coming with me to the Headmistress _now_.”

“But—”

Harry ignored his bleating and took his wand away again. Then he cast a hex around Aethelred that would enclose him in Harry’s own variant of a globular shield, safe and protected but also unable to move more than a foot in any direction. Harry turned back to Chang. “I’m so sorry, Miss Chang. I hope that you’re all right?”

Chang swallowed, large tears standing in her eyes for a moment before she blinked them away. “I’m all right, Professor. His curse didn’t actually touch me.”

_There are other ways of not being hurt, _Harry thought, and nodded to her. “All right, Miss Chang, but please come talk to me later. Class dismissed,” he added over his shoulder as he hauled Potter towards the Headmistress’s office.

*

Headmaster Dippet had retired after the turn of the year, as if Professor Greyhand not being there any longer had been some kind of signal. Harry hadn’t chosen to look into it. If Dumbledore or Grindelwald had put pressure on Dippet, he didn’t want to know about it.

The Transfiguration Professor, Julia Rowan, had become the new Headmistress. She was in her seventies, with chiseled dark features and long hair that had gone entirely white. Harry wasn’t surprised, for some reason, to come up the moving staircase and find her behind the desk with two people he recognized as the Potters from Diagon Alley sitting in chairs across from her. It had been that kind of day.

Playing on the floor was—

_No, not my father, _Harry chided himself sharply when his eyes would have turned to the boy. _James, that’s all. A toddler._

“Why are you manhandling my nephew?” Euphemia Potter asked in a low, flat voice. She had her dark hair coiled around her neck in a severe braid, and she leaned forwards as if she could reach across the distance between them and wrench Aethelred away from Harry.

“Because he just tried to cast the Cruciatus Curse at another student,” Harry said, and released Aethelred from the shield. At least he was ready for it and didn’t stumble, even as he did stand upright and gave Harry a look of hatred. That would have been all Harry needed, to get the boy wounded in front of his aunt and uncle, his (adoptive) parents.

What had happened to Aethelred’s parents had been some kind of magical accident, and that was all Harry knew. He wished, now, that he had paid more attention to that, but he avoided news about the Potters, turning his face away. Even more than the Blacks, he could have no connections to them.

“What?” Euphemia asked. “Aethelred, is this true?”

“He took my wand away!”

“In the sort of manner that might be expected to happen in a Defense classroom,” Harry said flatly, when Euphemia and Fleamont turned identical expressions of outrage on Harry. “And after he refused to answer a question, implied that both I and another student were dishonorable, and otherwise acted like a willful _child_.”

“Casting the Cruciatus curse is illegal,” said Headmistress Rowan.

“But Professor—Evanson says that he _tried_,” said Fleamont, puffing up his chest beneath his long white beard. Harry sneaked them a glance from under lowered eyelashes. He had known that his paternal grandparents were old when they had James, but it was a different thing to see it. “Therefore, he can’t be punished with Azkaban.”

“No,” Harry said coldly. “But he can be punished with detention. Professor Rowan, if you want to handle it, then I’ll understand.” That would get him neatly out of the confrontation with the Potters he could feel building.

Although what they were doing here in the first place, when they couldn’t possibly have known of Aethelred’s _indiscretion, _was puzzling Harry.

“You had an absolutely appropriate reaction,” Professor Rowan said, and turned one of the freezing expressions she was good at onto the Potters when it sounded like Euphemia was about to make a noise of protest. “Your nephew tried to _torture _someone, Mrs. Potter. I abide by Professor Evanson’s term for it.”

“It was just—” Aethelred broke off, although Harry had the impression that was because of the way Fleamont frowned at him rather than because he was really _thinking _about how he sounded. But then the boy switched tactics, and pointed a long finger at Harry. “Anyway, none of this would have happened if not for him.”

“You refused to answer a question and then acted inappropriately when you lost a duel, Mr. Potter. You should—”

“_You _should stop prancing around shaming our family!”

Harry felt as though the air had turned to water in his lungs. He coughed and shook his head. “Mr. Potter, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have no connection with your family.”

Professor Rowan’s lips pinched shut, and she stared at him. Too late, Harry remembered that she was a Legilimens, with the ability to sense lies. He’d tried to avoid telling any in front of her, but this one was blatant.

“We came here because you do.” Euphemia narrowed her eyes, and then turned the full force of her glare on Aethelred, who stopped looking pleased with himself. “We suspect the connection may be _unfortunate, _but we hoped you would approach us before something like _this _happened.”

“It’s more than unfortunate, he’s a bastard, he’s shaming the Potters! Why is he being allowed to get away with it?” Aethelred shouted.

Harry drew himself up slowly. This, at least, he could answer. “I’m not a bastard Potter child, Mrs. Potter.”

Professor Rowan blinked. “He’s telling the truth,” she said, and nodded to the Potters when they glanced at her.

“Then who are you?” Euphemia didn’t seem inclined to let it go, if the way she leaned forwards and stared at him was any indication.

Harry shrugged. “An Evanson. Someone who never intends to make a claim on the Potters.” He knew from the way Rowan nodded—subtly, she probably thought—to Fleamont and Euphemia that she would have registered the truth of that statement, as well. “I haven’t gone around naming you as my family or anything of the sort.”

“But we’re rich!” Aethelred burst out.

Harry stared at him. “What does that have to do with it?”

“You’ll want to make a claim on us because of that.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “My wages as a professor here more than see to my needs.”

“The truth,” said Professor Rowan.

“I—am sorry this unfortunate incident happened, Mr. Evanson.” Fleamont’s voice was a little stiff, but it sounded sincere. James stood up and toddled over to his father, and Harry fought as hard as he could to keep his eyes locked on Fleamont’s face and off the boy who would have been related to him in a different timeline. “We waited for you to make yourself known to us, and when you didn’t, we thought you would try blackmail or something of the kind.”

“Suspicious, aren’t you?”

The words were out before Harry could stop them, but Fleamont only nodded. “When your family reaches the level of prestige that ours does, then you’ll understand what it means to have enemies.”

Harry held back the bark of laughter that would have made everything worse, and nodded. “Perhaps so.” He faced Professor Rowan. “Would you please give me a reassurance that I can take back to my classroom, Headmistress?”

“What kind of reassurance?”

“That the student who tried to torture another student will be _punished._”

“And you don’t want any kind of redress for yourself?” Euphemia asked, in a voice that slathered everything with more suspicion.

Harry shook his head. “I could give detention, which I’ll do after I have that reassurance.”

“Yes, of course,” said Rowan, and gave Aethelred a disappointed glance. “No matter what sort of grievance you thought you had against your professor, attacking another student with an Unforgivable is beyond the pale, Mr. Potter.”

Harry nodded, then turned and walked out of the office. He was sure Potter eyes followed him.

But he didn’t care. He couldn’t afford to care. It was unlikely the Potters would hire him to tutor James or Aethelred, after all.

And he already had more than enough links to families from home, and enough concerns.


	23. Connections Like Threads of String

“I wanted to let you know that Mr. Potter has been removed from school for the duration of the term, Miss Chang. He will take the OWLS at home, and it is—being considered whether he should return at all.”

Louise Chang relaxed with a loud sigh and clutched the sides of the chair with both hands. “Thank you, Headmistress.”

Harry frowned to himself as he studied the relief rising from Chang like mist. He should have realized before this that she was worried about retaliation from Aethelred. It didn’t speak well to his powers of observation and care for his students that he hadn’t. He resolved to try and be more careful in the future.

“Did you have any other questions that you wanted to ask me, Miss Chang?”

“No, Headmistress. May I go now? Um—I have a study group for our OWLS meeting in the library, and I don’t want to miss it.”

“Of course, Miss Chang.” Rowan nodded, and Chang did something from the chair that wasn’t quite a curtsey and then fled towards the door.

Harry started to stand—he’d assumed he’d been brought along just to handle the situation if it had turned out that Aethelred was in the Headmistress’s office—but Rowan turned to him. “Sit down, please, Professor Evanson.”

Harry cursed, but only inside his mind. On the outside, he nodded and said, “Of course, Headmistress.” He sat down again and waited for the interrogation that was probably going to follow. She was an ally of the Potters to have had them up in her office.

But Rowan only stared at him, and the moments chimed past. Harry frowned at her. What did she think was going to happen? He was going to crack open and spill all his secrets at her feet?

Rowan finally gave up on the tactic of eloquent silence and said, “The Potters came to me yesterday with claims that you were probably treating their nephew unfairly in class due to the fact that they thought you a bastard Potter child and would take it out on him. In fact, they seemed to expect Aethelred to come to my office with a report right after class. It was—unexpected when you brought him instead.”

“I find his arrogance and attitude insulting,” Harry said. He would give her some pieces of himself, but not the whole. He owed _no one _here that. “But what truly crossed the line for me was that he intended to torture another student. And _why_? I noticed your report on the consequences for him included nothing about that, Headmistress.”

“Young Mr. Potter has had several unfortunate consequences of the magical accident that killed his parents heaped on him,” Rowan said quietly. “I believed his mind to be unstable even before this. His behavior has been getting increasingly out of line, although because it most often occurred outside of class, only his Head of House had reported her concerns to me. I have seen him several times here over the last few months, and urged him to find a Mind-Healer at St. Mungo’s, but he refused under the impression that it would make him seem weak. However, I did not believe that it would increase to the point that he’d try to torture another student. My word to you.”

Harry studied her for a second, and then nodded. “I believe you, Headmistress. I didn’t believe that he would do something like that, either. I’m glad that he’ll be punished, and that he won’t be allowed back until he has Mind-Healing.”

Rowan smiled for the first time, her eyes narrowing a little. “Your addition is noted, Professor. Evanson. And I promise, the Potters will have to show me _both _that their nephew has received Mind-Healing and that his behavior has changed before I allow him to return.”

“Then that’s all I can ask for.”

Harry’s mind turned to what he would say to Chang, in case she felt threatened by Aethelred, and then he started when he realized he was still sitting in front of Professor Rowan’s desk and she was studying him in utter silence. “My apologies, Headmistress. I was woolgathering.”

“I’m glad that you were. It gave me time to decide how I want to approach you about the other part of this.”

Harry raised his head and tried not to show the way the stiffness raced through his muscles in response. “Oh?”

“You did nothing wrong, Professor Evanson. I am simply wondering why you are denying your obvious connection to the Potter family.”

“How many people know?”

Rowan shook her head. “It’s _suspect, _rather than know. And I realize that you were telling the truth when you said that you weren’t a bastard child. Fleamont’s brother Charlus was younger than he was, and somewhat wild when he was an adolescent. They must have wondered. You would be about the right age for a half-brother of Aethelred’s, especially if you’re older than you look.”

Harry felt a pulse of distant sadness that he had never known enough about the Potters in his original timeline to be sure whether Aethelred and Charlus had existed there, or not. Well, he knew Charlus had, because he’d been married to Dorea Black on the Blacks’ family tapestry, but Harry had had no idea what their relationship was to Fleamont and Euphemia, his own grandparents. “I was involved in a war before I came to teach here. I think you know that?”

“Professor Greyhand said something about it, yes.”

“As a result of the war, I committed—war crimes isn’t the right word for it, but it’s the term that comes closest to it.” _What _is _the right term for shattering the timeline and making everyone worse off than they probably were? _“But those crimes spread out to touch many, many people. I know that they affected the Potters, although only indirectly. I can’t—be part of them. I once wished I could, but that’s not the way things are, and I have to accept it.”

Professor Rowan’s eyebrows had climbed as she listened to him. “I am aware of how the term war crimes is used in the Muggle world. I am surprised that you admit to them.”

Harry shrugged limply. “Like I said, it’s not exact. But the best thing I can do now is stay far away from them. Especially since they thought I was a bastard child and their result was to get angry at me instead of approach me.”

“Fleamont and Euphemia are very prideful. They thought it was _your _place to approach _them._”

Harry just nodded, but Rowan went on. “And Charlus and Dorea left a great deal of money from both her family and Charlus’s investments in various experimental spellcrafting ventures that only began to bear fruit right before they died. I think that Euphemia and Fleamont wondered if you would try to claim it.”

“Why would I have a claim to it if I was Charlus’s bastard son?”

“Oh, not a legal one. And you wouldn’t have a legal entitlement to Dorea’s share. But you could make things uncomfortable enough that the Potters might have to pay you off to avoid a public scandal.”

Harry lifted his hands and covered his face, trying to hold back the laughter that bubbled up his throat. He kept it back, mostly, but enough emerged that Rowan said in a sharper tone, “Professor Evanson, are you all right?”

Harry let his hands drop to his lap, and nodded. “Yes, Headmistress. Fine,” he added, when she kept staring at him. “I just—that’s so _far _from crossing my mind that it’s absurd. If I’d tried to connect with them, it would have been to have a family, not for money. I find family infinitely more valuable.”

“I see.” Professor Rowan studied him some more, then nodded. “Very well. I cannot presume to advise you on your family relationships, Evanson, not when I hardly have contact with mine—”

“Thank you—”

“But I will tell you about some other rumors that are circulating concerning you, and that you may wish to attend to.”

Harry bit his lip to avoid giving an exasperated sigh, and nodded. It was better to know about them than not, even if he just ended up ignoring them, the way he suspected he would. The way he probably _had _to.

Rowan gave him a short glance as if she’d heard that thought, then turned and studied the wall behind his shoulder. Her fingers were linked together on her desk. “Some people are saying that you used to be an Auror.”

Harry breathed through the silence, and didn’t answer.

“That you have a close connection to the members of the Black family. That you got the Defense job here because of Ministry favor. That you are a bastard child of the Black line yourself, which would—explain much.”

“_That_ one’s not true,” Harry interjected before he could stop himself.

“But that implies that one of the others is.” Rowan sighed. “Others say that you used to be an Unspeakable, that you are a powerful Dark wizard concealing his true allegiances, that you were a follower of You-Know-Who before his fall.”

Harry shook his head. “That’s a ridiculous amount of rumors to be circulating about me. Is it just because some people think I’m a Potter, or a Black?”

“No,” said Rowan, her head tilting a little. She wasn’t easy to read, but Harry had the feeling that he’d surprised her. “Because you have true _power, _Professor Evanson. Because you appeared from nowhere and you’re an excellent duelist and making your mark as a professor. Because you have passionate beliefs that are bringing you into conflict with some students and their parents, and few people can believe that they did not hear of you before this.”

Harry closed his eyes. There was a brief memory of a taunting voice that sounded suspiciously like Voldemort’s, except that he’d never said something so complimentary to Harry. _You will never be normal, no matter where you go. You never go unremarked._

Harry finally opened his eyes and shook his head. “I don’t know what to tell you, Professor Rowan. I haven’t deliberately attracted attention, and I’ll do my best not to attract more of it.”

“If you told people the truth, they might not spread rumors so easily.”

“If you think that, then I can only guess that you haven’t been the target of many rumors.”

For a moment, Rowan looked as if she would object, and then she sighed. “I only want to make sure that you do not present a danger to the students of my school, Professor Evanson—”

“I’ll swear an Unbreakable Vow here and now if you want.”

Rowan continued without a sign that she’d heard him, except a slight widening of her eyes. “And I want you to be happy. I want to retain you,” she added, probably because Harry was staring at her. “You are the best successor to Greyhand that I could imagine. Most of your students like you, even the ones who find your views challenging.”

Harry paused. That hadn’t been what he’d expected to hear. A second later, he nodded. “Thank you for telling me.”

“If you could be happier,” Rowan continued in a lower voice, “then I wouldn’t have to worry about you leaving.”

“I like it here,” Harry said. “I like my students. I like teaching.”

“And you won’t claim the family that’s yours, as anyone can see from that hair, or do anything to make yourself happy.”

“Teaching makes me happy.”

Rowan sighed.

*

“What exactly did you think you were doing?”

Fleamont winced away from the sound of Orion’s voice and glanced at his wife as though she was going to provide an excuse for him to stand up and walk away. Euphemia merely scowled. “He was prancing around looking like a Potter and making no move to acknowledge us! We had to do something.”

“And that included sending your shatter-brained nephew to confront him?” Orion closed his eyes and pulled back his own magic into his body. He could feel the cold, crackling power ready to break forth, and he would make no point he wanted to make if he hurt the Potters or even simply froze a lamp. “I suppose it didn’t occur to you that there’s a reason for his close association with the Blacks?”

“I thought maybe he was a Black bastard, instead of a Potter,” Fleamont offered.

“He’s the man I intend to marry.”

That made them both sit up as though hit with a pain hex. Euphemia shook her head back and forth, her braid swaying a little. “But _why_? He’s scruffy, he acts as though he doesn’t care about appearances or family, he’s _poor_, he’s probably illegitimate, no one knows a thing about where he comes from—”

“I know.”

Orion gave a superior smile at the startled expressions on their faces. Back when he had been trying to maintain a close alliance with the Potter family, trying to forge the kind of nearness that would mean their sons would be friends, he would have hinted. But now, he simply enjoyed the feeling of having something he could hold over their heads.

It fueled the fire that had begun burning in him the minute he had heard about the incident at Hogwarts. So the Potter boy hated Harry and wanted to strike out at him, to the point of getting himself removed from Hogwarts? Harry, of course, would think that punishment enough, but Orion knew the kind of hatred Aethelred Potter had wielded, the kind that could make someone think _anything _was justified.

He would watch out for the boy, and make sure that he didn’t pop back up behind Harry’s unprotected back at the worst moment. He would be Harry’s shield.

And his sword, if necessary.

“_Where _does he come from?” Euphemia demanded. “Is he really Charlus’s bastard son? He said he wasn’t in front of Headmistress Rowan, and she told us that he was telling the truth, but—”

“You should have accepted her assurance,” Orion said, while slow delight moved inside him like a crocodile. “I am certainly not going to tell you.”

“Orion!” Fleamont slapped his hand down on the arm of his chair. “We only want to know that he doesn’t have some sort of claim over the Potter estate!”

“You don’t know a thing about Harry, if you think he would want that. He barely accepted the money I gave him as a courting gift.”

“Taking money from a courtship is one thing, and thinking you have a claim to it because you should have inherited it is another.”

“Harry doesn’t want the money. I think that he would have told you the same thing himself if you’d given him a chance and approached him like ordinary people, instead of playing this game where you were afraid that you would seem to be spurning someone you should have taken in if you ignored him and afraid that you would remind him of his claim on the estate if you approached him.”

“_Is _he Charlus’s bastard son?”

Orion savored the taste of the knowledge a moment longer, then released it. “No.”

It hardly satisfied them. Euphemia shook her head and set her braid swaying again. “Who _is _he? Why does he call himself Evanson? How can he look so much like a Potter while not being one?”

_Wouldn’t you like to know._ Orion smiled a little. Then he said, “I think this conversation has gone on long enough. Harry’s secrets aren’t mine to spill. If you want to know, then ask him, and remember that you should do it in some way other than pointing a wand at him.” He rose.

“Wait, Orion!” Fleamont slammed his hand on the arm of his chair again. “What about the alliance we were discussing? That you would train Aethelred, that James would spend some time with your sons?”

“The training has become more imperative now that Aethelred will be out of school for the next term at least,” Euphemia added in a complaining tone.

Orion raised his eyebrows, savoring the delicacy of the irony this time. “Why would I want to train someone who aimed a wand at my beloved?”

Euphemia leaned forwards. “The boy was perfectly all right. And I don’t buy that this Evanson is your _beloved. _Blacks don’t know how to love in the regular way, we all know that.”

“Yes,” Orion acknowledged calmly. “We love in a driven, obsessive way, and I plan to protect Harry whether or not he ever accepts my suit. You should think about what that would mean if I was left in a room alone with your nephew.”

“But—damn it, Orion, not even Evanson felt that Aethelred was a danger! He didn’t hold a grudge against him.”

“Not for your nephew’s actions against himself, I’m sure. My beloved is too forgiving.” _Not that I can complain about that when it’s the trait that might permit me to earn a place at his side someday. _“But the Chang girl he attempted to torture? I don’t think Harry will forgive _that_. Which means I won’t.”

“It was—Aethelred’s been under a lot of stress.”

“Not as much as Harry.”

“How can you possibly know?”

Orion offered them another superior smile, and a bow, and his exit. When he had Apparated back to Grimmauld Place and settled down his sons in the kitchen with biscuits, he took out the folded letter from his pocket again to read.

He had written Harry offering to do something about the Potters and Aethelred, and got back a response that looked hastily-written, probably because Harry had imagined that Orion would storm off in vengeance right away and he needed to do his best to keep Orion from doing something “foolish.”

_No, I don’t want you to do anything to them. Your offer of help is appreciated, but unnecessary._

Orion lingered on the word “appreciated,” as he had before, and closed his eyes to savor it.

To savor the burning in his chest, too, that wasn’t like any other feeling he had ever known.


	24. Coming of Age

“So you’ve left me alone for a suspiciously long time.”

Mariana raised her eyebrows. That was the first thing Harry had said to Orion Black when he walked into the Prince home; Seneca, as usual, had been “usefully distracted” elsewhere. Harry had greeted Sirius and Regulus, and indulged Severus, who was clutching his hand with a determined expression and shooting the two Black sons dark looks that said Harry was his first.

Black only raised his eyebrows a little. “I didn’t wish to pressure you any more than I had with the money.”

“So you were hoping the delay would sweeten my disposition?”

“I was hoping that it wouldn’t hurt.” And Black bent towards Harry and spoke, softly, but not soft enough to avoid Severus’s ears, which Mariana knew meant there would be questions about it later. “To show you that I don’t truly wish to enslave you or have you bound to me against your will.”

“You want to _enslave _Mr. Harry?” Severus demanded.

_Or questions right now, _Mariana thought with a sigh, and crossed the large space of the drawing room, through the sunlight shed by the large windows, to gently place her hand on Severus’s shoulder. “Of course not,” she said. “You just heard Mr. Black say that he doesn’t wish that, Severus.”

“But he _used _to want to.”

“And now he doesn’t,” Mariana said firmly, glaring at Harry when she saw a smile tugging at his lips. He had helped to bring up the subject, so he could help in soothing Severus now. It seemed that he saw the justice of that, and he turned and squatted down in front of Severus.

“No, Severus, it’s okay,” he said, brushing the thick black hair out of her grandson’s face to expose the lightning bolt scar. “I promise, okay? Mr. Black doesn’t want to do bad things to me, and even if he did, he wouldn’t have the power.”

From the look on Orion Black’s face, he only agreed with the second of those statements, but Mariana didn’t think it would be wise to point it out. Severus stared intently into Harry’s eyes for a minute, much more intensely than Mariana would have been comfortable with herself, and then he nodded.

“All right, Mr. Harry.”

Harry stood up and changed his tone to a light, airy one, while taking a few steps back from all of them. “I thought we were gathered here to celebrate a birthday? So where’s the cake and the presents?”

“_My _birthday!” Regulus yelled from the floor. “I’m _three_!”

“Well, I’m four,” Severus muttered as Harry went over and snatched Regulus up, reeling him around his head while the little boy laughed. Mariana gently pressed on her grandson’s shoulder, making up, she hoped, for the loss of attention, and Severus did ease back a little from glaring at Regulus.

“I do find myself wondering,” Orion said in the casual sort of voice that meant nothing casual was happening, “when Mr. Potter’s birthday is.”

Harry’s shoulders jerked, but he still put Regulus carefully on the floor, not that Mariana would expect anything less from him. Then he looked over his shoulder at Orion and shook his head. “You _don’t _want to know.”

“Yes, I do, or why would I ask the question?”

“No. I meant that it wasn’t a sincere request for information. It’s just more of the sort of nonsense that you like saying to me.” Mariana was sure that, without the children around, Harry would have used a stronger word than “nonsense.” He was glaring at Orion with his jaw tense, and only an interruption from Sirius, who was in the middle of the purple rug in front of the fireplace, made him leave off.

“I thought your name was Evanson, Mr. Harry. But you’re really a Potter?”

“No,” Harry said, his voice so soft that Mariana couldn’t really hear him. He reached over and brushed his fingers against the scar on Severus’s forehead again. “I’m just the person I named myself as.”

“You’re Harry Potter,” Orion Black said, but his voice was heavy. Harry jerked his head up to glare at him again, and Mariana sighed. It seemed that months of leaving Harry alone until the end of his first school year as a Hogwarts professor hadn’t cooled Harry’s boiling temper _that _much. “I wish you would accept it. I want you to have everything you want, and it’s obvious that you want a family.”

“I have one,” Harry said, and his eyes closed for a minute. Mariana suspected he was remembering the people he’d left behind in his first world, the original timeline. Then he shook his head and sat back. “Or I’m trying to have one. Anyway, I thought we were gathered here to celebrate Regulus’s birthday?”

“I’m _three_,” Regulus said again, and held up his hands with three fingers on either one spread. Sirius nudged him.

“That’s six, idiot.”

“Sirius Orion Black, do not call your brother an idiot.”

Harry said that harshly enough to make Sirius curl up a little, and Orion sighed as if he suspected it was the only way that he’d hear Harry saying his name any time soon. Mariana caught his eye, staring at him. Orion nodded back and changed direction, saying, “Yes, this is a birthday party, and we’ve only kept the gifts and the cake out of the room so that they wouldn’t get damaged by a whirlwind of children.”

“_I _am not part of the whirlwind,” Severus insisted.

Mariana chuckled, and Harry did the same, and the awkwardness of the moment passed.

*

“Enough is enough,” Albus said quietly as he walked into the library where Gellert sat holding a book and staring at the wall.

Except for the twitch of his neck, Gellert might not have noticed him. Albus stood between him and the fire and waited for a long moment to be acknowledged. But Gellert ignored him, just as he had since the evening the Aurors had questioned them. Months of the silent treatment. Albus had tried to put up with it, had tried to ignore it, had tried to reassure himself that at least it meant that Gellert wasn’t trying to enlist him in any more attempts at restarting the war.

“If you feel this strongly about it, I’ll turn you over to the Aurors,” said Albus.

Gellert started and looked at him properly for the first time in months. “What?”

“This silence pretty much accuses me of betraying you.” Albus folded his arms and paced over to the far side of the library. Suddenly he was the one who couldn’t look at Gellert. But he had promised himself he would end the silence, one way or the other, and this was the only way he could think of. “It says that you would prefer to spend your time in the custody of Aurors or members of the Wizengamot. Or perhaps simply in Azkaban. You could trust them to be what they are. You don’t trust me anymore.”

“I—Albus, that isn’t true.”

Gellert sounded honestly lost, but then, he had sounded honest when he had forsworn any desire for world domination years ago, too. Albus turned around and leaned his back against the nearest bookshelf, keeping his expression as calm as he could. “Then please explain to me what this temper tantrum you’ve been throwing is all about.”

Gellert glanced aside from him, his hands clenched for a second on the arms of his chair. Then he said, “My curiosity is driving me mad.”

“Your _curiosity._”

“The war _must _have gone differently in that world Potter comes from,” Gellert said, and then he was on his feet and pacing back and forth, one of those fluid movements Albus never actually saw him make, only saw the aftermath of. He had dueled like that, their last time fighting and other times, too, all power and grace like swift smoke. “There can’t have been two timelines that were exactly the same. What happened? Where was I? How close did I get?”

“And you think that you could be happy if he would answer those questions?”

“Not happy.” Gellert glanced at him and let out an abrupt laugh that sounded chopped off at the end. “Not when my _husband _was carrying the weight of spells around in his head to alert the Aurors if I ever sounded like I wanted to start the war up again.”

“I paid the price for that. I won’t apologize.”

Gellert turned away, but his hands were trembling rapidly. “Bring Potter here. Make him tell the truth. Then—maybe I could give this up. If I knew for sure that what happened to me in the other timeline was worse.”

Albus closed his eyes. He disliked the idea of forcing Potter into compliance with Veritaserum or the like, especially since their alliance was already delicate. The less association they had with the time-traveler, the better.

But he also wanted peace in his own home again. And it might be that he would be able to persuade Potter—Evanson—however he wished to be known.

“All right. I’ll Floo him.”

*

Harry walked into what was apparently the Minister for Magic’s house with his head high and his worries dancing around inside his head. Maybe he should have refused the summons. The problem was that he wasn’t really sure he _could_. After all, Dumbledore and Grindelwald knew what he was. He would lose everything he’d managed to build if they exposed him.

_Maybe that would be a good thing. Maybe that would finally pay for what you took from everyone._

Harry bit the thoughts off sharply, reminded himself that at least one of the men he was here to meet was a Legilimens, and came around the corner into a shining white sitting room that said, more clearly than even the spotless floors had, that there were no children here. Dumbledore stood up with a smile to welcome him from an armchair that nearly matched his beard for color.

“Welcome, welcome, Harry.”

Harry nodded distantly back, keeping part of his attention on Grindelwald, who sat in another white chair nearer the fireplace. His attitude was perfectly relaxed, which just sent Harry’s instincts to screaming new heights.

“I invited you here because my husband has—well, some curiosity about your original timeline and how he fit into it.”

“I’ve told you what I’m willing to tell you,” said Harry, and faced Albus for a second. The Elder Wand made a little murmur in its holster wrapped around his wrist. Harry wondered fleetingly if it was confused about a copy of itself so nearby.

“That’s unfortunate,” said Albus, with what seemed to be genuine regret. “But it is driving him, well, nearly mad. He wishes to know whether he was successful in conquering the world that you came from.”

“And what happened to me if I was not,” Grindelwald interjected, sounding as if he resented even having to speak the words. “And what happened to Albus. And whether he became Minister.”

Harry growled under his breath. “I can’t help you. That timeline is gone and buried.” The Elder Wand’s humming was louder now. Harry touched it to try to calm it, and saw Albus’s eyes dart to the holster briefly.

“You’ve dropped hints,” Grindelwald said. “But how can we be sure that you’re telling the truth? I _have _to know.”

“Why? So you can try and resurrect that timeline if you think it’s better?” Harry spun around to face Dumbledore. “Let me tell you this: you weren’t married. You weren’t _together. _He was in prison and you were dying.”

Dumbledore sighed out, but he still stood closer to Grindelwald than Harry, and that shadow of regret was still on his features. “I’m afraid that I agree with Gellert to an extent. We can’t be sure that you’re telling the truth.”

Harry knew the sparkling vial that appeared in his hands, and he reacted without thinking, but with the blast of power from the Elder Wand. The vial broke apart, scattering the potion all over the nice white carpet.

“Bastard,” Harry hissed, still aiming the Elder Wand while Dumbledore was shaking shards of glass and drops of blood from his hand. “You think that you’re going to _force _me? Go fuck yourself.”

Dumbledore’s jaw fell open a little, as if he truly hadn’t expected that. Grindelwald was the one who laughed like the madman he was and stood up.

“I told you that wouldn’t work, Albus. He has his reasons to conceal the truth from us. For _lying_. Whatever he did to break time has to be a part of it.” Grindelwald prowled forwards, and Harry recognized the expertise of a master dueler. He hadn’t drawn a wand yet, but maybe he didn’t need to. “Stand still, Potter, and I won’t wrench the sanity from your mind along with the truth.”

Harry whipped the Elder Wand up to face him. “And are you the one who came to me in a cloak, too?” he demanded, too on edge for caution. “Who messed with Seneca Prince’s mind?”

Grindelwald halted at that, staring at him with dark eyes. “What are you talking about?”

Determined to betray no more of his secrets, Harry held onto his wand, and ignored the Disarming Charm Dumbledore flung at him. It wasn’t going to work, not when the Elder Wand wanted to stay with him. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to be your guest here, and I’m not going to tell you any more secrets.”

“Please, Mr. Potter, see sense.” Dumbledore took a step towards him, too, but halted when Harry stared at him. “Harry. All you need to do is tell us what the other timeline was like, and we’ll let you go.”

“_No_.” The thought that they were willing to use Veritaserum on him made nausea rise up in Harry that he hadn’t felt since Umbridge was at Hogwarts in his first world.

The one he’d destroyed. The one he’d _broken._

“I did enough harm to other people when I came here, when I altered time. I won’t do more.” The words burned like an oath in him, and they should be. He had said the words to himself when he woke up each morning, when he stared into the mirror and thought about the fact that Sirius and Regulus were growing up without their mother, when he saw the lightning bolt scar on Severus’s forehead and resisted the urge to tell Severus what he had once been.

“Just telling the truth wouldn’t harm anything, Harry.”

“You don’t think so? When your husband would keep digging for more and more truth, and insisting that it couldn’t be real even if I _was _under Veritaserum?”

“What _happened _to me?”

And something else broke, splintering in Harry like the shards of the mirrors he remembered falling about him as he tumbled through time, leaving his original world behind, along with all the friends and the people he’d ever loved.

“You lost the duel to Dumbledore,” Harry said, and his voice was cold with fury, but that appeared to make Grindelwald more inclined to listen. “He put you in prison. Nurmengard. You languished there for years and years, while Dumbledore became Headmaster of Hogwarts. In the end, you were killed by Voldemort because he was looking for the Elder Wand, and he thought you would know what had happened to it.”

The wand in his hand hummed. Harry ignored it for the moment, consumed with watching Grindelwald blink hard and visibly try to wrap his head around the words.

“And Albus didn’t—come to me?” Grindelwald’s voice was subdued.

Harry laughed until he choked. “How should I know? I was a kid. I didn’t know about that kind of thing. I only knew what the public knew. Not even as much as that, not until I was older.” And that was true, and not a lie, and it didn’t require them to know who he’d been. “I know Dumbledore was honored for dueling you, and he became Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot and Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards, but never Minister. He was also one of the few people leading the resistance against Voldemort, when he returned. He died fighting him.”

“So he was defeated, as in this timeline, but he returned?” Dumbledore asked.

Harry glanced at him and nodded. “Surely you don’t believe he’s really dead, when he has his obsession with immortality?”

Dumbledore blinked. “I’m afraid I didn’t know that about him.”

_Of course he wouldn’t. He isn’t Headmaster of Hogwarts in this world. He didn’t go to retrieve Tom Riddle from the Muggle world, or at least I don’t think so. _Harry closed his eyes and sighed out. “Well, at least in the original time I came from, he was obsessed that way. He’ll still be alive. You should do everything you can to protect Severus Prince.”

“It seems as though you’re already doing that, my boy.”

Harry’s eyes snapped open before he thought about it. “Don’t _call me that._”

Dumbledore hesitated and glanced over at Grindelwald, who hadn’t moved and hadn’t repeated his demands for information, either. “Yes, well, perhaps I have lost the right,” he conceded, and managed to make it sound as though he was being magnanimous.

Harry just shrugged and looked away. His fury had drained off, but he wasn’t going to trust them ever again. He could still see the glittering drops of Veritaserum out of the corner of his eye if he looked. “Are you going to let me leave?”

“Yes, of course we are. Gellert?”

Grindelwald was standing there staring at Harry, but he started and jerked his head up when Dumbledore spoke. “Yes, of course. You can leave. I—I never tried to leave the prison and do anything?”

“If you did, it wasn’t as though I would have known about it.” Harry kept his voice as emotionless as he could. The last thing he wanted to reveal now, after having convinced them of his lack of other knowledge, was that he’d been the Boy-Who-Lived.

“Of course.” Grindelwald stood there looking faintly disturbed and nothing else as Harry went back to the Floo.

He stumbled out of the fireplace in his Hogwarts professor’s quarters—it wasn’t as though he had anywhere else to live—and sat down on the floor, not in a chair. He put his head on his knees and wrapped his arms around himself.

He had made his peace, mostly, with living in this world that he had more than half-created. But nothing before had brought home to him so forcefully that there was no one here who really cared about him, no one who knew who he was, no one who would stand to fight for him against figures as powerful as Dumbledore and Grindelwald.

_Merlin_, he missed Ron and Hermione.


End file.
